The Violet Room
by Sarehptar
Summary: While working a psychology internship, Myde is given the challenge of analyzing Ienzo, a mysterious patient who spends his days writing on the walls of his hospital room. But when the story of 'Zexion' and 'Demyx' starts to sound familiar...
1. The Composer

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_ Sarehptar  
_

and

_ DistortedGaze  
_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ _I

Ρŗεłυđε – τ σ – ă – Ń ε ω – Ċσηċεŗŧσ :

Τ ђ ε – Ċσмρσśεŗ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_I was Ienzo. I was Zexion. Now I am an impossible hybrid of the two: accepted once more among the Somebodies, carrying that name that is not an anagram. I bear the memory of that Other life and that non-existence, but I am neither the Shadow-walking Schemer nor the boy who followed in Ansem's footsteps._

_I thought, in mockery of the Superior's goal, I had become complete by dying. By this logic-less rebirth, I thought I had become _whole.

_I was wrong. "Ienzo" had returned—but my heart had not._

o ― ― ― ― ― **» ****Vίσιετ ** « ― ― ― ― ― o

"Hello Ienzo." The soft voice did not make him turn.

"Good morning Miss Aerith."

She shut the door behind herself, not flinching despite a sharp hiss from the automatic lock. Aerith's sigh was echo-like in the room, and she clicked on the harsh fluorescent ceiling light without asking Ienzo's permission—she did it every morning, and he had long since stopped complaining about the sudden switch from darkness to light. The hem of her pink scrub ghosted against the empty standard-issue hospital chair, starched fabric sticking to the sterile teal plastic arm. The chair's metal and vinyl back was pushed haphazardly against the wall, crooked and out of place. Ienzo had used it earlier this morning.

"How are you feeling today?" Aerith called as she wound her way around the low bed toward the far wall of the room. He was crouched near the baseboard, black marker idle in his hand.

"Miss Aerith, I am not capable of feeling."

Ienzo liked to say her name. Once upon a time, Aerith had thought it was simply to be polite (he was always careful with his words), but she'd come now to believe it served another purpose. If he called her, she had to acknowledge him. If she listened, his words had value. If she answered, he existed.

Ienzo had come to Rufus Memorial Hospital distant and cold, swearing that he was nothing—that he did not have a heart. It still made so little sense… All the records indicated he had lived a perfect life as a child; then that drastic change…

"You look tired," she said finally, folding her skirt to kneel down to him. The blue-haired boy did not turn to look at her, but his cobalt eyes were shadowed, dark purple rings beneath them making the odd color stand out only more vividly.

"I remembered something new." He did not elaborate, and Aerith did not strain to read the tiny letters scrawled, in flawlessly straight lines, across the smooth wall of his room. Ienzo, she thought, seemed to enjoy ruining hospital property. They had repainted his walls four times in the past two months.

"Is it still not ready?" Aerith inquired. He did not answer her. "Ienzo, would you please consider writing in the notebook I gave you? The maintenance staff—"

"Will you send them my apologies?" he murmured distractedly. "And you can dispose of that notebook." There was no justification for his demand. _'But why?'_ she wanted to ask; it wouldn't have done any good. Ienzo's measured replies always left her more questions and no answers.

"A journal isn't a final product. A story doesn't need to be perfect to be written down on paper." Aerith meant to sound comforting, but in the cold room, the words sounded shallow and small. The young psychiatrist traced a lacquered fingernail over the white-tiled floor, hoping to find at least one dust mote. Nothing. Ienzo's floor was as barren as the rest of the room.

"The page..." He looked up at her finally, blue-steel hair whispering across his pale cheeks. "On the wall, my story is the work of an insane man. On the page, wouldn't it look like fiction?" The marker flicked back and forth between his thin fingers in aggravated jerks.

"Is it more real to you if you don't write it on paper?"

"Real?" Something like the shadow of a sneer glinted in his eyes. "The only real one here is you, Miss Gainsborough."

"Ienzo…" She closed a delicate hand over his shoulder, the stark white cotton scratching at her palm. The cobalt-eyed boy did not flinch away or lean into her touch—as always, he was indifferent. And then all of the sudden he wasn't. He was still, harder, colder…

"Maybe I'd rather keep you all from analyzing it." He coughed a laugh that crept, caustic but quiet, through the room. The tip of the Sharpie pressed hard against the wall and his fingers clenched white around its thin gray body. Aerith did not know how to reply.

Ienzo _knew_. He knew that they had copied it all down off the walls, every sentence, everything he had never told them. He _knew_, she could tell from the narrowing of his eyes, the stiffness of his pale jaw. _Are you feeling frustration?_

"The shadow of it," he answered the thought she had not voiced. It wasn't surprising—he was a genius, undoubtedly, two steps ahead of her at any given moment. Aerith Gainsborough was a psychiatrist; it was her job to dissect the minds of her patients. With Ienzo, Aerith knew that _she_ was the one being dissected. It left an unsettling taste in her mouth.

"Sometimes I swear you can read minds." Her hand on his slender shoulder patted congenially. Ienzo shifted away at last, something dark and unpleasant flickering in his eyes before dying so completely that Aerith was not sure it had ever been there to begin with.

"You're just too transparent," he replied, but there was an edge of something like fondness in his words.

"I have no reason to keep secrets Ienzo."

"And I am not allowed to keep them." It was an unexpected trap, a challenge—Ienzo had drawn her in and now she could not bow out of the conversation. Either way, she would be caught. He could spot a lie, but the truth was cruel.

"If… If you had really wanted to keep it a secret from us, you would never have written it anywhere, on the wall or in a journal," she tried to sound firm saying it. Ienzo did not look at her; his delicate jaw was a clenched line and Aerith worried if she had used the wrong choice of words.

"It's a massive amount of information—but you already knew that." He stared at her from the corner of his eye, cobalt gaze darker with what might have been another emotion he denied having. Something akin to guilt pressed hard in her stomach.

"I…" Aerith started, and then realized there was nothing she could say.

"I would forget everything if I did not get it out of my head." He looked away again, strands of blue-steel hair falling in his eyes. "I have to write it, but I didn't want you to read it. Do you think I'm insane?"

"I don't—" she stopped, her soft green eyes sliding closed. "I don't think you are insane Ienzo. You reality is just… different from mine."

He was sorely tempted to tell her that, as a non-existent being, he really didn't have "a reality" at all. Instead, he offered her a half-smile. "That sounds like a different definition for the same thing."

There was silence for a moment while she searched for some way to refute him. Finally, Ienzo went back to writing, black letters crowded, but neat and stark, against the dull yellow wall. Outside, a cloud passed over the sun, shadowing even the tepid light that leeched in closed slats of the window blinds.

"What do you think of my story Miss Aerith?" he murmured. There was an air of nonchalance to the question that did not match his wavering gaze.

Aerith caught and fretted her bottom lip between her teeth. "I…" She wanted to deny having read the chronicle. "I don't like it. I have a feeling it ends in tragedy."

"Oh no," Ienzo's voice was quietly mocking then, laced with some slithering undercurrent of irony. "My story has the perfect ending. Good really does always triumph."

"But that means death for Zexion."

"Yes," he laughed once, dryly, "that is what it means."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» ****Vίσιετ ** « ― ― ― ― ― o

Aerith had retreated to Ienzo's plastic chair and plucked idly at a loose thread on her scrub. From here, across the shadowy hospital room, Ienzo looked too small. He was a shade of what he should have been: thin from spending too much time trapped in his room, pale… even his hair—such an odd shade—was dull from the cheap hospital shampoo.

She couldn't help but notice his hands were smudged with black residue from the marker and the wall. They were always like that; the stains were almost permanent now. Something about the smudges was endearing—but also painful. Black on Ienzo's hands… it was like a symbol of everything she had failed to achieve with him.

The brunette's smile shook but then grew stronger. "You have kitchen duty today." The only sign that Ienzo had acknowledged her was a momentary stilling of his marker.

"All right," he said finally.

"And you're not going to manipulate the older patients into doing your chore for you, right?" She tried hard to sound reproachful, but that tone really didn't suit her.

"I would never manipulate any of my fellow patients," Ienzo deadpanned. The Sharpie made a continual dull squeak as he traced it across the plastered drywall.

"You _did,_ just last week when you tricked poor Marlene into cooking all the soup in your place." The green-eyed woman ran a soft hand across a free lock of her curled brown hair.

"Marlene volunteered. I would hardly call that manipulation." Ienzo's voice had a perpetually cold quality that took Aerith by surprise no matter how many times she heard him speak: the sharpness did not fit his thin frame. It bred an awkward fusion of detachment and _fragility_ that cloaked Ienzo in the façade of someone teetering on an edge—of a teenager stuck in that frustrating state between boy and man.

If Ienzo's file hadn't confirmed that he was turning twenty-one in three months time, Aerith would never have believed it. Or maybe she would have. That voice, exuding superiority, could not ever have been confused for a child's. It had the sound of someone so much older, someone who had weathered years and seen more than she could ever hope to. Someone that—she stopped the thought before it led her onto dangerous ground.

Sometimes Ienzo's story seemed far more real than it had right to.

"It was canned soup," she struggled to pick up the vein of conversation again. "All you had to do was add water and stir it occasionally."

"Far be it from me to deprive Marlene her right to stir soup," he murmured as he pushed errant blue-steel strands of hair behind his ear.

"Ienzo," Aerith attempted to scold through the smile threatening to lift her lips, "you told her that learning to properly stir soup was an integral step to becoming a master chef."

"Isn't it?" He capped the marker and stood, flexing legs stiff from sitting idle for hours.

"That doesn't change the fact that you _know_ Marlene's dream is to run her own bar and restaurant. You took advantage of the fact that she'd never turn down culinary practice." The green-eyed woman peeled herself from the chair, catching quiet snaps of static electricity as her clothing brushed against the plastic.

"I don't see why that bothers you."

"It doesn't," Aerith stated as she slid her clearance card through the door lock, letting out a breath when the bolt hissed open. She sometimes had nightmares about being trapped in the hospital rooms…

Aerith shook off familiar anxiety and strode into the hallway. "It doesn't bother me at all," she insisted, "except for the fact that Marlene got double kitchen duty, on top of her other responsibilities, and you managed to –once again– skip out on your only chore."

The hospital staff had given up on trying to get Ienzo to work. He was as slippery as a slice of butter when it came to cleaning and worse when it came to helping the nurses. The first time he was required to push the medicine cart for Doctor Shera, he conveniently misplaced a number of pill bottles. None of the bottles had ever turned up, even after the staff's desperate search—but more than the few of the patients had acted odd for weeks afterward. Needless to say, Ienzo was immediately deemed "too troubled" to even stand in the vicinity of sensitive materials.

Too troubled. _Please_, Aerith scoffed quietly to herself. Every move the blue-haired boy made was purposeful and measured for maximum result yield. He did not want to push carts around for hours, so he "misplaced" medicine. He did not want to clean, so he spilled chemicals in a sudden bout of clumsiness which never affected him at any other time.

The only chore he had not automatically shirked was kitchen duty. Aerith thought that might be because Ienzo actually enjoyed cooking. Getting him to admit something –anything– like that would be as difficult as pulling teeth, so she let it go. Liking or not liking the chore didn't seem to make much of a difference in the end anyway: he still skipped out as often as possible. He was actually, she smiled, sort of lazy.

Ienzo followed Aerith slowly out of his room, and in the half-light of the hallway, his ivory clothing looked luminous. The brunette doctor stalled for a moment, holding her place beside his door as if she was waiting for something—or someone.

Down the hall, the elevator chimed and slid open, releasing an ebony-haired man into the hall. His clothing was also black, pressed and stiff. Aerith sighed quietly, a sound that could have been called unhappy or pleased. Both feelings applied to the man coming toward them, shined black shoes clicking on the navy tile floor.

"Good morning Tseng," Aerith said, torn between trying to sound curt and being friendly.

"Good morning Doctor Gainsborough," the security guard said.

"I asked you to call me Aerith." The beginnings of a girlish pout swept over her face, and then were wiped away as Tseng remained blank.

"We are in a workplace—we should act like professionals." There was hint of warmth in the security guard's voice that momentarily relieved his uptight air. Then, as if it were a tiresome duty, Tseng turned his stern gaze on Ienzo, nodding a stiff greeting.

"Well," the blue-haired boy scowled, "good morning to you too, Warden."

Tseng Taak: the hospital's newest security guard and the man assigned to monitoring each and every one of Ienzo's movements. From the moment he was let out of his room in the morning to the end of his recreational hours, Ienzo was shadowed by the quiet but imposing man.

But Tseng Taak was also Aerith Gainsborough's oldest friend and protector. They had grown up together, and even before he had been an officer of the law, Tseng had kept by the brunette's side—through the death of her mother, through her struggle to get a Doctorate… Tseng had been unerringly faithful in his support of her, and Aerith could never, in any way, hate him. The things he did, however… the way he confined Ienzo… None of the other guards had been as strict, ever.

Aerith ran an anxious hand through the loose, curled strand of hair hanging over her shoulder. "Please Ienzo, Tseng, let's try to get along today."

"I don't feel obligated to get along with those who strive to upset the order of this hospital." The man's voice was sharp but quiet, mellow but hinting at something far more firm. "You seem to forget, Doctor Gainsborough, that Ienzo is not here to be rehabilitated. He is here by order of the court, and it is my responsibility to keep what happened before from happening ever again."

Aerith blinked her deep green eyes once, desperate for something to say in return. "But Tseng," she murmured, "he was just a child…"

"You may believe he has changed, but I harbor no such illusions," the black-haired man's calm voice struck a sour note in Ienzo.

"I wouldn't harm Miss Gainsborough." The words came automatically, even as some part of Ienzo, some voice in the back of his mind, wondered if he actually _might_ harm her. If she was the only thing standing in his way... if there was something he could gain from it… what was to stop him from ripping her to shreds to achieve his own ends? It was not as if he would feel remorse…

"Ienzo will be late for kitchen duty," Aerith's soft voice echoed in the corridor. Purposely, she set off toward the elevator, refusing to even look back. It was like this every day between those two, though today had been especially tense. It was hard to be around them on mornings like these, when she did not know who to defend. Ienzo deserved so much more freedom than he was given; Tseng acted only in what he thought was her –and the hospital's– best interest.

The elevator doors rattled slowly to a close, blocking Aerith's view of the navy hallway, the surreal paintings, and the blinking red light on the lock that kept Ienzo their prisoner.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» ****Vίσιετ ** « ― ― ― ― ― o

"Ienzo!" a choir of voices called as Aerith, Ienzo and Tseng pushed through the cafeteria doors. Aerith's green eyes were still squinted against the bright light streaming in through the windows, but Ienzo, though he spent far more time in darkness, did not seem bothered at all. A stampede of footsteps echoed throughout the room before Aerith's group was unceremoniously beset by a herd of the younger patients.

"Irritating little Dusks," she heard Ienzo mutter, but his attempts to push through them weren't very serious.

The children clambering for the blue-haired boy's attention were patients of every class and disorder. Most of them barely knew Ienzo and never saw him outside of the cafeteria—still, they flocked to him with every story they could think of, all their complaints, and more than a few _biggest_ secrets. Ienzo didn't appreciate their presence in any manner: he crossed the cafeteria each day with a blatant scowl on his face, looking like he might throw the children out of his way at any moment.

It stunned her at first, considering Ienzo's obvious disinterest in the children's lives. Now, it seemed to make perfect sense. Ienzo was a voice of reason, one who was not a psychiatrist. He appeared to the children as a pinpoint of normalcy—just what most of them were lacking. But in a way, (Aerith smiled at the way they pushed to be closest to him) Ienzo was also still a child; just old enough to be considered wise, but young enough that the children thought he could relate to their problems. It was really no wonder they gravitated toward him, she thought.

Aerith trailed after him as Ienzo began to cut a path across the wide room. Tseng slid back to rest against the wall beside cafeteria doors. It was their routine again: the security guard would act as if he was there guarding the entire room—but his eyes would never lift their stare from Ienzo's back, and his hand would not stray far from the gun holster at his hip. Tseng would be silent, motionless… but a constant pressure nonetheless. She wondered how Ienzo could stand it; she wondered how Tseng could be that way.

Ienzo's blue-steel hair glinted in the sunlight streaming through the tall windows, and she suddenly noticed that he was a good deal ahead of her. He'd slipped through the narrow aisle between two rows of tables, hoping to limit at least the number of younger patients who could cling to his sides. Stepping a little more quickly, Aerith had almost caught up with her blue-eyed patient when he stopped dead, trapped by a petite, tugging hand.

"Ienzo," a tiny red-headed girl smiled up at him, "I drew a picture of you." She gingerly held the crayon-covered paper out to him. He took the paper and surveyed the blob-like form with only a fleeting look of disdain.

The indigo-eyed girl stared up at him eagerly. Ienzo gave her a smile, but it was empty and not at all warm. "It's very nice, Kairi."

The crayon-drawing didn't quite look like him, Aerith couldn't help but think. There was blue-purple hair covering one side of his circle face, and his body was nothing but a mass of black. A cool, evaluating look swept across Ienzo's face when he moved to look at Kairi again, as if he were staring through her. His lips formed a word but did not speak it, and he was still for a long moment. The red-head girl shifted nervously, as if she expected him to throw her picture away.

Then, just as quickly as that odd look had come, it was gone, replaced by his typical disinterest. He obviously couldn't care less about—Aerith blinked in surprise as he folded the picture carefully in quarters and put it in the pocket of his loose white pants. _Something_ had just happened, something important… but Aerith wasn't sure what or even how it had happened.

"Ienzo, are you okay?" another little girl called. It was Marlene, who had gently elbowed her way to the front of the pack of children. Aerith couldn't help but smile at the shorter girl: Marlene had braided her mahogany hair and tied it with the bright pink ribbon she'd borrowed from Aerith last week. The imitation was heart-warming.

Even though Aerith wasn't Marlene's psychiatrist, the little girl was easily one of her favorite patients at Rufus Memorial. She was sweet but frank, and always said exactly what she meant to say. More than that, Marlene had an adorable habit of hero-worshipping. She drew all of her passions from the few individuals she loved, a select group of people Aerith was proud to be a part of.

For several months now, Marlene's dream had been to own and operate a restaurant.

The entire idea had begun with a passing comment—a passing comment made by Ienzo, no less. He had complimented the food on a day when Marlene helped in the kitchen, pointing out that someone with "such skill" could easily become a chef. Aerith knew exactly what he actually meant to do with the comment: he was hoping Marlene would become interested in cooking, thereby relieving him of kitchen duty.

The compliment had had far more effect than anyone could have expected. As if she had been waiting for direction, Marlene leapt on the idea of becoming a chef. Aerith held back a giggle. Only Ienzo could give someone a life goal completely by accident.

"You look sick," Marlene said, looking up at the shadows under Ienzo's eyes.

"You know," he sighed quietly, "I really have been feeling a bit run-down. But I have kitchen duty today…"

"Ew…" one of the boys, Aerith thought it was Denzel, whispered. "You can't cook if you're sick. Won't you… contaminate us?" Yes, definitely Denzel. The pale brunet boy suffered severe Mysophobia and had long believed himself infected by a disease he called _Geostigma_. They were still working with him.

"I'll cook for you!" Marlene smiled shyly. "I'm going to be the best cook ever, so I've got to practice lots." She ran off toward the kitchen before Aerith could stop her.

"Maybe you should rest?" Denzel murmured to Ienzo, blue-hazel eyes worried and wide. "What if you're contagious? I don't want to… get more sick." He frowned lightly, brushing cherry-brown hair off his freckled cheek. With another nervous glance at the blue-haired boy and at the other patients, Denzel turned and trotted after Marlene.

"Ienzo, I'm disappointed in you." The green-eyed psychiatrist couldn't stop her hands from planting firmly on her hips. "What you just did was not right."

"I don't have a heart Miss Aerith. Right and wrong never meant much to me." He pushed on through the crowd of children, which was slowly dissipating as the young patients went back to their own assigned seats. Few dared to linger near the "sick" man—they saw too many doctors already.

"You specifically did what I asked you not to," Aerith said.

"I did not. I followed your instructions to the word." He threw a cobalt stare over his shoulder at her. "You distinctly said 'you're not going to manipulate the _older_ patients.' Marlene is… half my age?"

"Ienzo!" she huffed in exasperation.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» ****Vίσιετ ** « ― ― ― ― ― o

"Are we all here?" a rusty-orange-haired man crowed, leaping up onto a plastic chair with abandon. He flopped down with a smile, crossing his green-pant-coated legs underneath himself.

"Yes Doctor Pan!" a choir of voices chimed as the rest of the patients hurried to their chairs. The smaller children were fidgeting already, fresh from their naps. Seating himself with a half-sigh, Ienzo hoped their counselor would get distracted—sometimes when the flighty young doctor got off on a tangent, he would tell stories through the entire session.

"We're gonna have a great time in Group today!" Doctor Pan's voice had this perpetually cheery caw to it that made him sound years younger than he really was. Something about the green-clad man's brilliant white grin seemed to guarantee that _no_, they were not going to "have a great time in Group today."

Not that Ienzo _ever_ enjoyed Group. An excuse to clump patients together and encourage them to snivel about their problems before a sympathetic audience, group therapy had been a thorn in the steel-haired boy's side for more years than he preferred to count. The rust-haired doctor himself was a rather new addition to the hospital, but it hadn't taken Ienzo long to re-sort his mental hit list. Doctor Peter Pan, with his constant games and noise, was now quite high—and climbing.

All the younger patients' shouting and giggling was starting to give Ienzo a headache, one that did not subside even after everyone had settled into their uncomfortable classroom-styled chairs. The customary circle was a little lopsided from all the pushing going on today, but that didn't seem to bother Doctor Pan.

"Why don't we start by having everybody tell their favorite childhood memory?" The counselor's brown eyes were alight with mischief, to match the conspiratorial tone in his voice—Doctor Pan had the odd habit of speaking to his patients as if he were speaking to adventurous followers.

And the man's absolute obsession with youth was grating to no end. If someone got him started on the toils of growing up, Doctor Pan could chat up a record-breaking storm.

"_Our bodies might grow up, but our hearts don't have to!"_

If it weren't for Tseng, leaning silently against the door and filling the room with his sharp stare, Ienzo would have walked out long ago.

The blue-eyed boy surrendered with a sigh, pressing a hand against his temple. _Memories…_ He had thousands of them—thrice as many as anyone else in the room, at least. But a favorite memory? Nothing from Zexion could fill that place; _although there was the time…_ Ienzo smirked just thinking about it.

The lexicon was a complex weapon that revealed its mysteries slowly, one-by-one. Zexion had first learned the ability to trap people within its pages by practicing on Xigbar.

But that wasn't a childhood memory (though Number Two's reaction had been quite immature)… Was there a memory from this _current_ life? Any number of mundane things would have worked. He'd won enough spelling bees as a child to count as an oral dictionary. He'd done absolutely normal things with his absolutely normal family.

_Or how about the memory led me to mur_—some dark look must have slipped across his face, because the girl next him, a brunette with hair that flipped almost impossibly upward at the ends, poked at his side.

"What's the matter?" she asked, with a smile. Selphie was her name, Ienzo was almost certain of that. He turned away without answering.

Not _this_ life. None of it had any worth.

Doctor Pan had started with the patient on his right, all the way across the room from Ienzo. The steel-haired boy didn't even bother to listen, was too caught up in trying to find some part of any of his lives that he might have—at least once upon a time—appreciated.

"_One…two…three…"_ Ienzo _counted slowly,_ _laying out each of the materials with care. There was a twinge in his shoulder where the strap of the heavy bag had pressed into it, but he was far too excited to care. "I've got enough right?"_

"_Kupo!" the Moogle agreed, nodding its head so its over-sized red ball antenna bounced wildly. _Ienzo_ laughed, but the humor turned quickly into anxiousness as the little item-maker gathered up his synthesis materials._

_The eight-year-old boy fiddled with his blue scarf, following the Moogle's back-and-forth fluttering with bright grey eyes. His bag felt overly light now that it was empty of the gems he'd spent months collecting. Rough material from the pack brushed under his fingers as he patted idly at his side. Above him, the tops of Radiant Garden's tall white buildings disappeared in a fog of falling snow. _

"_Kupo!" the Moogle waved a stumpy paw, bat-wings flapping erratically to stay level with _Ienzo_'s rather short height. _

"_You finished already?" _Ienzo_ held his hands out eagerly to see what the Moogle had produced. It dropped a black band into his palm and, with a flutter of its wings, climbed back to hovering height. It was immediately enveloped once more in soft green light, but _Ienzo_ was too busy inspecting his new treasure to notice._

_With a respectful nod to the Moogle, _Ienzo_ took off through the brilliant and snow-coated streets of Radiant Garden._

"_Mother!" He came dashing into the warm kitchen of their house, all attempts to be dignified forgotten. "Look what I got!" _

"_Oh?" The grey-eyed woman knelt down to examine his trinket and let out an (only slightly) exaggerated gasp. "You got the Moogle to make this?"_

"_Yes, from all the shards I gathered," there was a tinge of pride in _Ienzo_'s voice that put a brilliant smile on his mother's face._

"_Well!" She held the black band up the light and the charms rang when they brushed against each other. "This is very special. Your very first Moogle treasure—and a Midnight Anklet too!"_

"_Is that good?" He reached to try and take the band back from her, but she chuckled and held it just out of his reach. With her free hand the grey-eyed woman unwound his scarf and pulled the empty bag off his shoulder, patting the few lingering flakes of snow off his shoulders._

"_It's… a ward against darkness," she said, pressing the band into his open hand slowly, as if it meant something different now._

"_Darkness?" The anklet's ebony stones glimmered in the half-light of the room. Between round beads, diamond-shaped blue and red gems stabbed out, bursts of color against the black. _

Ienzo_ straightened suddenly, realizing just how off his behavior had been. He stiffened into a stick-straight posture, ordering his excited face into a more somber expression, a _proper_ expression. His mother's grey eyes changed as he did—until he wasn't sure who she was seeing. That distant, hesitant look was usually reserved for his father…_

"_I'm not afraid of the dark anymore Mother," the boy insisted, suddenly sounding much older than his eight years. "Only children are afraid of the dark."_

"_Of course," she stumbled over the words, "of course." _

That memory wasn't _his_. No, it was his. The lines between that _other_ Ienzo and the boy inside Rufus Memorial Hospital were so tattered and permeable that he was sometimes unsure where one life started and the other ended. It was all a part of him but _wasn't_ and he'd driven himself to madness more than once just trying to decide _who_ he was...

There was a dull murmur in his ears from the other patients telling their memories, but it sounded more like toneless ringing than words. Ienzo knew his turn was quickly approaching, and there weren't any words in his mouth. The memories he had once loved he could not tell, and everything else…

And then, very suddenly, it did not matter what he said. It did not matter what memory had ever been his favorite—because there was something so much more important pressing on him.

It was a memory, but not in his mind. The air in the room was barely moving, but there was a different scent lancing through it now, faint and coming from far away, but real nonetheless. It brushed against his sensitive nose, drawing a rattling breath free of his lungs.

The slinking smell was of brine and sand, and everything about it was so familiar that his mind lurched sharply, struggling to make the right connections. _Who? Who?_ He knew the scent but _who? _Adrenaline hit his system in an overdose, making Ienzo's hands shake where he'd fisted them around the plastic sides of his chair.

There was no ocean in the world of Dawn City. There was no way that someone could smell like the sea—no way that _this_ Ienzo should know what a sea smelled like.

There wasn't enough of the scent; it did not linger long enough for him to put a name to it. But knowledge, like a shock of icy water, had settled in the back of his mind. As the last threads of the salty smell faded away, a new sort of consciousness took its place.

Though it seemed impossible, the scent was a part of _Zexion's_ memories.

"—zo? Ienzo!" Doctor Pan's voice jerked him abruptly out of his thoughts. The orange-haired man stared at him expectantly. "Your favorite memory?"

"I…" Ienzo wanted to throw a caustic and sarcastic comment back, but even his wit seemed to have been wiped away by the shock of that new-not-new smell—the scent that was entirely gone now, as if it had never been. "I…"

"I've got one!" Selphie waved her hand frantically, as if trying to catch a teacher's attention. Doctor Pan's inquisitive look darted off Ienzo, and the sprightly man was immediately wrapped up in Selphie's story, forgetting in a moment that Ienzo had not shared at all.

But his stumble had not gone unnoticed. Ienzo could feel Tseng's eyes boring into his back. It wasn't rage that tightened the steel-haired boy's fists around the edge of his seat. It wasn't rage that clenched his teeth. It was just _something_, another indefinable piece of himself that sharpened his focus on the silent security guard to a needle-fine point.

Tseng was once again an unmoving obstacle in his way, separating Ienzo from another piece of freedom—separating Ienzo from walking, breathing proof of non-existence.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» ****Vίσιετ ** « ― ― ― ― ― o

Aerith's Gainsborough's office was only slightly less neat and ordered than the woman who worked in it. The room (with its pale green walls) was decorated by flowering plants in a plethora of pots and hanging fixtures. They were a brilliant splash of color and scent that seemed to walk hand-in-hand with Aerith's delicate sweetness. Sometimes in the spring the cacophony of flower pollens got to Ienzo's sensitive nose, and he spent their daily private appointments sniffling and irritable.

Despite that, Aerith's office still managed to be Ienzo's favorite room in the entire ward. Behind the plants and coating every open space on the desk were _books_. Not the infuriatingly simple children's books the staff left in the rec. rooms, but real books—thick, heavy tomes of psychological analysis, human nature, all the classic works of fiction… When Aerith didn't have any questions or advice, she let him read through their mandatory sessions.

But Ienzo would not get to read today, it seemed. The doctor had her neat notepad out, a pencil tucked behind her ear, and a curious, intrigued expression on her face. Shifting in his customary chair, a cushy pale-salmon confection (and the only free seat in the room), Ienzo resisted the urge to sigh. He reached across the empty space to pull the silver Collision Cradle toy off her desk. The tiny silver marbles fluttered wildly for a moment before he stilled them, pulling back the first sphere in the chain. It swung in a pendulum arc, descending to the strike the next in the line. In less than a second, the last marble in the chain absorbed the kinetic energy and flew upward, arcing back down to start the entire circle over again.

_But even energy is not perpetual_, he couldn't help but think. Each cycle caused more and more power to be lost, until there was nothing real left at all... Just fragments… _Only the potential to be_. Once he had been freed from Group, Ienzo had hunted the hall almost desperately, searching for even a trace of the strange and familiar ocean smell. There had been nothing, as if he'd imagined all of it; conjured it up from some distant memory. It had the potential to be, at least.

The brunette doctor cleared her throat softly to get his attention, setting the notepad to the side and smiling at him. It was a bracing smile, one that asked for his patience more than anything else.

"Could you tell me again," Aerith murmured, turning a bit to shift through a set of notes poised haphazardly on the side of her desk, "about your mother's reaction when you first told her you had no heart or emotions?"

"She asked if my girlfriend had broken up with me." Ienzo's voice was so flat and clinical that the brown-haired doctor couldn't stop herself from laughing. "It was a testament to how little attention she paid to my real actions. I was ten years old and had only recently discovered that girls did not automatically suffer from infectious diseases."

"So your perceptions of the world were changing. And it was around that time that you first began to refer to yourself as…" she sighed, "a Nobody."

"I know there is some connection there. As my world widened, memories of things I had certainly never seen came back to me… But why _then_? There was never a single sign of it before. I don't know…"

"We've been over that period several times. There were no significant events in your life. No traumatizing experiences. There was no reason for a delusion to begin then."

"Well, it's fortunate for the both of us that it's not a delusion." His voice was quiet, softer than normal; Aerith wondered how many times he had told himself the same thing.

Ienzo's cobalt eyes did not waver off the chipped spot of paint on the window frame behind her. "A lexicon," he muttered suddenly, meeting her eyes truly for the first time since their session had begun.

"An encyclopedia?"

"Yes," he shifted slightly, rigid now with something like anticipation. "Lately I have been thinking that in comes down to the lexicon."

"I'm sorry, I'm not following you." Aerith tilted her head slowly the side. His eyes were bright for the first time in a long time. She knew if she could see into his mind, it would be racing—catching on to something new and eye-opening. She couldn't see past the bright blue of his irises; she would have to wait and see if he would disclose it all to her.

"Around that time, I visited the public library and read a lexicon of modern psychological contributions. There was an article," his voice had sped up slightly with 'the shadow of excitement', "concerning the purpose of human _hearts_. The author stipulated that it is the mind that weighs morality and wants. That hearts, rather than acting as the cores of our beings, may act as grounds for production."

"So the mind is the source of personality, and the heart is an accessory. Go on," Aerith pulled the pencil from her behind her ear and took down his words carefully.

"No, not only an accessory. I think the mind is where all things are _envisioned_. Emotions, light, darkness… like dreams, these things are insubstantial, illusionary. Almost… shadows of what could be."

"Shadows of emotions…" Aerith muttered as she wrote faster, scribbling her own connections in the margins, suddenly finding correlations that she had never seen before.

"Yes. I believe our minds _know_ what feelings are—but only hearts can truly _feel_. In a way, the heart gives birth to what the mind can only dream." His fingers were fisted in the white cotton knees of his pants, knuckles white and red with exertion. "Being a Somebody is, therefore, the very definition of solidity, reality… existence."

"So a Nobody, without a heart, would be trapped at the stage of illusions, the unreal. If what that article said about hearts was correct… a Nobody _would_ be a nonexistent entity. They'd possess minds to analyze themselves, to dream, to imagine feeling, but would have no means of turning those thoughts into reality." Aerith turned her own words over and over in her head, searching for the flaw in their analyses. Nobodies, Somebodies… it was all part of a remarkably intricate fantasy—intricate but, in the end, always false. Ienzo's logic should never have been so… plausible.

"Exactly," his half-dead smile wavered. "When I first read the article, I remember thinking the author was a fool. How could anything possibly live without a heart, even in a metaphorical sense?" Aerith watched his pale hand as it slid to fist in that starkly white hospital shirt, twisting deep gouges into the material over his chest. "How could anything live without a heart?"

Silence beat against them both in the wake of his question. It wasn't a new question. She still didn't have an answer.

"I would like to find that article…" Aerith murmured after a long moment, almost afraid to break the tremulous quiet they had fallen into.

"As would I." Ienzo's constant, vague frown had reappeared; his hands crossed contentedly over his thin frame. _And his voice is so hollow…_

Aerith was shivering and didn't know why.

A black and sullied feeling crept up in the back of her mind, wrapping cold tendrils around her throat and down her spine. It was a sudden, inexplicable fear, coated over with determination she knew was hers yet could not explain.

_They only pretend… they only pretend…_

She couldn't describe the feeling, couldn't make it stop. The fine hairs on the backs of her arms stood on end, as if some current of electricity (or maybe something _not so real_) had passed through the room, filled her lungs with lead and clawed at her heart.

Ienzo was still and silent in his seat; his cobalt eyes bored into her own as if he was seeing into her very core—or as if he was seeing straight through her, through everything, into the invisible _something_ (or _nothing_) that seemed to choke the air from the room.

Distantly, the clock tower bells began to toll.

"That… That means… our hour is over," she murmured, voice crushed and lost to the shadowy corners of the room.

He shifted suddenly, looked away… and the pressure in the room shattered like a pane of glass, lifting off her so quickly that she almost doubted it had ever been. The only trace of the oppressive feeling was a lingering film of discomfort. Aerith felt that, if she plucked at her skin now, a visible layer of _something_ might slough off it.

_Darkness_ was the word she was thinking but couldn't admit to, because _darkness doesn't coat people_ and she's _not afraid of the dark_ and _don't even start thinking like that because it's_ his _delusion, not real…_

The sunlight from the window was just as strong, had never wavered, and it fell gold and heavy on his pale skin. Ienzo's face was marred by his typical disinterest, but he had not stood to leave and even as he leaned easily back in the chair—something seemed _wrong_.

The word _darkness_ would not leave her mind until she forced it.

"I…" she grasped for something to say, disliking the lingering silence. "Oh, I almost forgot!" Aerith smiled, sudden relief coursing through her as the last traces of that strange tension fled the room.

"I didn't tell you about our new intern," the brunette continued, wondered why the subject hadn't come up before, but then sighed. The subject hadn't come up because Ienzo didn't care at all what went on in the hospital. "He'll be starting officially in a few days. But I think he was supposed to be here today for something?" She wondered aloud, tapping her pencil idly against her notepad.

She tried to the recall the intern's name but couldn't. Shaking off the sudden memory lapse, Aerith offered Ienzo another bracing smile. There was no way the blue-haired boy was going to like the rest of her news.

"Doctor Yen Sid said that our intern is interested in working with patients suffering from delusions," she said, "so he'll probably want to work closely with you. Is that all right?"

A contemplative look swept over Ienzo's face that the brunette doctor could not explain. His cobalt eyes were distant for a moment, and he lifted a finger to brush at the tip of his nose as if some strong scent was filtering in the room. At last, he muttered a quiet "hmm" that could have meant anything. She always had trouble placing his moods—but this look was new, and his answer was caught between intrigue and exasperation.

"And you'll treat him with respect?" she chided, one eyebrow lifted in what was meant to be an intimidating stare.

"Hnh." Not a yes or a no, Aerith noted. Hopefully the new intern had a strong constitution…

"By the way," Ienzo said while he climbed stiffly from the chair to leave; it was as if they hadn't been having a conversation at all, "I finished the fourth wall this morning. Could you please inform the maintenance staff that I'd like my room repainted by tomorrow? And," he added as an afterthought, "not that garish yellow again."

"What color would you prefer?" She opened the door to show him out. His cobalt eyes narrowed in thought for a few moments.

"Perhaps," he murmured at last, "a violet."

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Τ ђ ε – Ċσмρσśεŗ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**  
_1)_ Incredible amounts of credit go to my amazing beta-reader **Distorted Gaze**! She puts up with so much from me...

_2) _A few notes on pairings: This story _is_ Zemyx (Dexion, Myde/Ienzo, whatever), but I've never been one to write gratuitous lemons. (Believe it or not, sex scenes are not a requirement for fanfiction.) There are also a few rather unimportant side pairings involving Final Fantasy characters. All of this will develop slowly. Very slowly.

_3)_ This is my **first** Kingdom Hearts fanfiction! (I'm a bit scared to post it!) _So if you review-and please do-give me any constructive criticism you can!_ I have a lot to improve upon, I know.


	2. The Musician

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

and

_DistortedGaze  
_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ I _

Ρŗεłυđε – τ σ – ă – Ń ε ω – Ċσηċεŗŧσ :

Τ ђ ε – Μυşίċίąη

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

"Myde!" The voice was high-pitched and demanding, strong enough to break through the upbeat music pounding in his ears. He slowed, ragged Converse catching on a crack in the concrete. "Myde!" Footsteps beat in time to the guitar rifts and just as he was turning, a blurred hand darted up to snag an earbud from his ear.

"Hello Yuffie," Myde grumbled finally, but a smile followed the words. Yuffie Kisaragi, his best friend of almost five years, dropped the head phone and pulled back, planting both hands on her hips. He caught her sliding an errant finger through a belt loop on her khaki shorts, a familiar gesture that made his weak smile a little stronger.

She sorted her round face into a scandalized look, wide brown eyes sparkling with mischief. "Were you ignoring me?"

"No!" He twitched under her half-glare and slumped in his black sweatshirt when her scolding look melted into a grin.

Sighing, the aqua-eyed boy reached up to pull the other bud from his ear—only to find it missing. Yuffie waved his battered CD player tauntingly and skipped ahead, laughing as she leapt up to balance on a low brick wall. She pranced over creeping vines of ivy and the wayward limbs of a rosebush like she was walking on air. His hand, still frozen at his ear, shifted to rake through messy sand-blond hair. The mop was utterly untamable; he had long ago stopped trying to find a style it would obey.

"What are you doing here anyway?" Yuffie muttered, tapping her bottom lip with her index finger. Chocolate-colored eyes narrowed, and she drummed her feet on the bricks impatiently while she waited for him to catch up. "You don't have classes this semester."

"Picking up my internship forms." He grinned with the words—but the shallow smile wavered the moment she turned away.

"Oh _yeah_," the limber girl stuck her tongue out in mock disgust, "your job with the crazy people." Then she leapt from the wall to the lip of the fountain that marked the middle of Dawn City University's Centrum.

"They're not crazy Yuffie," he grumbled, and it sounded so condescending out loud, "they're just _troubled_."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde toyed nervously with his collar, feeling a bead of sweat, like a sticky raindrop, trace his temple. The automatic doors were held open as he stood halfway in and halfway out of the hospital's threshold. A cool blast from the air conditioner froze the droplets of anxiety at his hairline. His free hand crept up to finger a patch on his battered black messenger bag.

"Hello?" a pretty brown-eyed woman called from behind the reception desk.

"Hi!" His voice was stuck between shouting and squeaking. Wiping the last cool vestiges of sweat from his brow and into his dirty blond mop, Myde crossed the entrance foyer at last. "Hi…uh…My name is Myde and I'm the—"

"—new intern, yes? Doctor Yen Sid told me that you'd be coming in today."

"R-Right..." Myde wasn't sure if the receptionist was expecting him to say something else because she went silent, but then the printing station behind her flashed a green light and expelled a few pieces of paper so haphazardly that they fluttered off the tray and sprayed over the floor.

"Oh, I told Father to stay away from—" her pleasant voice trailed off as she disappeared below the desk to collect the errant papers. "Here you go." Myde leapt backward a few feet in shock as she popped spryly to her feet from underneath the desk. The freshly printed papers fluttered limply in her hands.

"This is some simple information about your hours—" she handed him a page, "—the dress code, facility safety guidelines, codes of conduct, just the standard." Papers flew at him almost as quickly as he could catch them. "And this," she held out the last page, "is a letter of introduction. If you get stopped by a security guard before we get your clearance badge printed, just show them this letter."

"Thank you Miss…" he paused to read her nametag, "Belle."

"Doctor Yen Sid will give you a brief explanation of your responsibilities here. His office is on the top floor, at the end of the hall. The elevators are right behind us."

"Okay. Um, thanks again." He tucked the papers into his bag carefully. Belle was a bit odd, he thought as he hurried around the reception desk and toward the off-white doors of the elevator. Myde noted that she was already engrossed in a book by the time he'd pushed the up arrow.

The heavy metal elevator doors shut behind him with an audible _thunk_, cutting off all view of the shining glass windows near the hospital's exit—his only escape route.

"I'm meeting Yen Sid," his voice was barely a whimper, "_the_ Yen Sid." Not only was he the director of the psychiatric ward in Rufus Memorial Hospital, Yen Sid was also revered as the greatest living psychologist in the entire _world_! Myde's textbooks had been decorated with his pictures and name, connected to this theory and that…

The elevator chimed suddenly, tearing the blond intern from his thoughts. The doors slid open too quickly for his taste, revealing a windowless hallway that stretched on and on, forever into a veritable cloud of darkness and what might have been the outline of a door. Halogen lights on the ceiling flickered and died. His feet froze to the floor of the elevator.

"I'm not smart enough to be a psychiatrist!" Before he could stop himself, Myde's hand slammed the 'door close' button. The off-white doors rattled and began to creep shut. "No, no, wait! Door open!" He poked desperately at the next button over, not relieved at all when the doors _did_ slide back with a chime.

He couldn't go back downstairs—he'd blow the entire internship! He_ had_ to talk to Doctor Yen Sid, and that was that. _Go legs, go!_ Myde's feet stayed resolutely pinned to the tile floor of the lift, knees shaking slightly of their own accord.

"I can do this," he insisted, talking more to his knees than anything else. He took a single step, putting one shined black shoe over the threshold of the elevator. "I _can_ do this." Another step. The blond set off into the windowless hallway with as much gusto as possible. His bag slapped heavily against his thigh, and the sound traveled ahead of him down the endless corridor.

Shadows seemed to cling in the crevices of the grey walls and the royal blue tile floor. Myde shivered in his white dress shirt, quietly beginning to hum a tune. He meant to drive off the pressing silence, but the notes reverberated off the walls and mutated into an ominous melody.

The hallway was hung with gloomy, surreal portraits of lopsided buildings and—Myde blinked—a triptych of brooms with arms, carrying pails of water. Oh, that was symbolism, wasn't it? He stopped to eye the painting.

"Brooms with arms…" The aqua-eyed boy cleared his throat, assuming a serious, stiff tone. "They clearly signify a desire for freedom from the mundane routine of human life. The artist aches for release from his responsibilities and the expectations of our society. Yet," he reached up to adjust a non-existent pair of glasses, "judging from the dark colors and the depressing setting, the artist knows that stepping away from his responsibilities will have serious repercussions."

Myde snorted back a giggle. "I used 'repercussions' in a sentence. Maybe college _is_ paying off."

Feeling as if he'd passed some sort of test with his analysis, Myde continued down the corridor, the bounce in his step nearly renewed. The hallway seemed less gloomy now, a little more inviting… He wished absently that there were windows.

The last door in the hall was a deep navy blue, flanked by two of the strangest plants Myde had ever seen. They looked like lopsided trees, covered in diamond-shaped leaves and giant purple and lime green flowers. They were planted in enormous gold star-shaped pots, as if they'd just stepped out of a child's dream—or a interior decorator's nightmare. On a second inspection, the door was odd too. There was a golden crescent moon emblazoned at eye-level, sunken into the smooth blue metal.

Suddenly, the confidence that had come with spouting psychological terms evaporated. Myde's feet, which had been so cooperative crossing the hall, froze again. His hand stilled above the moon design, unable to close the final inches and knock. Something considerably larger than a butterfly churned and leapt in his stomach.

_What if he asks a question I can't answer?_ Thoughts rocketed through the blond's mind, colliding and dying painful, fiery deaths. _What if he can read fear from my body language? _He pulled his shaking hand back slowly.

_Just knock!_ The encouraging voice in Myde's head sounded a lot like his mother. _Come on My', you know how much this means to us. Just knock._ His hand wavered between the door and his side for a breathless moment before—

"Enter!" an ominous, disembodied voice rang in the corridor.

Myde leapt a foot in the air, and only dignity kept him from streaking back toward the elevator at a roughly breakneck speed. Instead, he composed himself with a meditative exhalation, and hauled open the heavy metal door with a clammy hand.

"G-Good morning, my name is My—"

"I know who you are. Sit down." The man before him, behind an enormous cherry wood desk, was imposing even sitting still. A long grey beard flowed down his face, resting against the front of a dusty blue lab coat. Over his hooked nose, round, dark eyes glared in Myde's direction.

The intern coughed down a nervous laugh and scuttled to his seat: a cold wooden chair pushed nearly up against the desk. It was so low to the ground, Myde felt like an insect under the old psychologist's glare the moment he sat down.

"I assume," there was a harsh, strong note to the doctor's voice that made the intern's fingers clench nervously into the sides of his seat, "that you have already received your basic information?"

"Y-Yes sir… but… actually there're some forms I…" he flinched at the sharp narrowing of Yen Sid's eyes. Relieved to have an excuse to look away, Myde lowered his eyes and groped into his bag for the correct folder. "There are some forms I need to get signed… um… Here!" He pulled out the papers with a flourish, setting them on to Yen Sid's desk and mustering a smile.

The doctor's hand darted out and snatched them away without any pretext. His fingers were wrinkled and deeply veined, and Myde forced himself not to stare. With a displeased huff, Yen Sid smoothed a bent corner on the first form.

"All appears to be in order," the sharp, owl-eyed man murmured finally, pulling an ancient-looking fountain pen from his desk drawer. He signed them meticulously slow, measuring each loop before returning the forms to the blond boy.

"Now, as I was saying…" the silver-bearded man trailed off momentarily, making Myde's interruption seem a horrible transgression, "you have received your basic information. You will memorize it all." The unbendable will in his voice and the wide-eyed stare above his nose left no room for argument. "I will explain now how this ward operates and how you are expected to interact with the patients. Listen well; I will not repeat myself."

Belle had said that Doctor Yen Sid's explanation would be brief—it turned out to be everything but. The intimidation and anxiety that had plagued Myde began to wear off quickly, leaving him feeling a little empty. As the cold owl-eyed man lectured on about not keeping anything potentially dangerous in scrub pockets, Myde drummed his fingers idly on the chair's stiff arms. Only the fear of being caught kept him pretending to listen.

"You must avoid, in all cases, speaking about the patients' families. We've had more than one case of abandonment and—" the doctor cut himself short with a heavy sigh of exasperation. His veined hands crossed firmly over each other, fingers tapping a harsh harmony on the desk top. "I can see that your mind is wandering, intern." Myde cringed under the reproachful tone.

"No, I was listening!" the blond insisted; his arms flapped of their own accord before he could stop them.

"Of course you were." Even the old doctor's sarcastic tone managed to be frightening. "Regardless, all of the duties I described are explained in detail in this book." He pushed a rather hefty spiral-bound tome across his desk. "I expect you to read it thoroughly."

_The whole thing? _Myde thought, but externally, his head nodded along.

"You'll be working under Doctor Gainsborough, who will give you your daily assignments and make sure you are performing to our expectations." Some ominous note in Yen Sid's voice told Myde that those expectations would be extremely difficult to meet.

"Any research, notes, or experiments," the old man continued, "must be cleared with Doctor Gainsborough or myself well before they are undertaken. Failure to adhere to this rule will result in your immediate... dismissal." _Or death_, Myde flinched.

"Yes sir!" The urge to salute was almost unbearable, and the blond-haired boy pinned both of his hands to his sides. Without any warning, Yen Sid leaned sharply over the desk, jabbing one stone-strong finger at a pager button on his desk.

"Miss Belle, please send Nurse Porter to my office." He let the line connection die without saying good-bye, and then turned a hawk-eye on Myde. "Nurse Porter will give you a tour of the facilities and see you out." _And get you out of my sight_, the intern amended mentally.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Waiting for the nurse to come to Yen Sid's office produced a silence thick as butter, and Myde shifted nervously in his seat. The wood creaked in protest; one of Yen Sid's thick eyebrows shot up.

"Sooo…" the blond began in a breathy drawl. The old psychologist made no effort to pick up the thread of conversation, and Myde's weak attempt was left to die a slow and awkward death. Instead of speaking, the doctor steepled his long fingers before his chin, eyes roaming Myde's nervous face. He seemed to be analyzing—and if the severe frown creasing his lips was any indication, Yen Sid did not like what he was seeing.

There was a distant clatter out in the hallway, which didn't seem to bother the grey-haired man in the slightest.

"Never," Yen Sid added as an afterthought to his explanation, "let anything on or off the elevator with you."

"S-Sure," Myde managed to stutter, but his _why?_ was cut off when the office door burst open.

A thin, disheveled brunette stumbled through Yen Sid's door, clutching the door handle to balance herself. She straightened her tousled pale yellow scrub with fluttery hands.

"Terribly sorry to be late," the woman stuttered slightly in an accent Myde couldn't place. "I was just handling the children. They can be absolutely—" Yen Sid waved a dismissing hand that cut off her rambling instantaneously.

"You will escort our new intern on a tour of the ward."

"Intern?" Her button nose wrinkled in thought. "Intern? Oh!" The nurse's wide blue eyes finally landed on Myde. "Right, come along then!" Her smile was bright and open, a breath of fresh air after Yen Sid's permanent scowl.

The blond scrambled out of his seat, aquamarine eyes darting between the stoney psychologist and the excited nurse.

"Erm… thank you Doctor Yen Sid." Myde felt the inexplicable need to bow. They grey-haired man nodded stiffly in reply to his comment, and without any further pleasantries, the woman in the yellow scrub pulled Myde out of the office.

The heavy door shut behind them with a sound like grating stone.

"Welcome to Rufus Memorial Hospital," the brunette chimed, a bit belatedly. She pushed messy strands of brown hair out of her face with an errant hand. "You've already seen the lobby and Doctor Yen Sid's office, so it'll just be the patients' floors and…" she launched enthusiastically into a detailed explanation of the ward's floor plan.

"You _are_ Nurse Porter, right?" Myde tried to catch her in a lull.

"Yes, yes," she waved him off. "Jane."

"Huh?" What did _Jane_ have to do with anything?

"Jane."

"Huh?" Myde felt a bit overwhelmed as he hurried to keep pace with her. The nurse paused in her bouncy walk to look him over thoroughly.

"Me, Jane." She drew the words out as if talking to a foreigner. "You?"

"Oh!" He felt his face color with embarrassment. "I'm Myde!"

"Well then Myde, it's a pleasure to meet you." She snatched his hand and shook it. Her smile was tinged with excitement—as if she'd discovered some interesting specimen and was about to pin and inspect him. "You know, it's quite rare for this ward to accept interns," Jane's accent was bit distracting, and Myde paid more attention to placing it than to what she actually saying.

"It must be because of the accident with poor Doctor Shera," the nurse continued. "Terrible thing, really…"

"Accident?" He tried not to sound too nervous, but the thought of work-related injury made him blanch. The elevator doors chimed and opened to let them enter.

"Yes," Jane sighed, "an ambulance hit her." As if that was all there was to the story, she strode into the halogen-lit lift without another word. Myde followed slowly, feeling an entirely new type of nervousness. _An ambulance?_ He'd never even heard of that happening!

"So," the nurse brightened up again, "there are three floors to the ward. The top floor is for offices," she chuckled, perhaps at the memory of his petrified face back in Yen Sid's lair. "Most of our patients live on the first and second floors."

_Most of our patients?_ Myde thought, but decided not to interrupt her—Jane was on a roll now, he could tell. The elevator chimed again, opening its doors to the second floor.

"You can see a few of the patients' rooms right now; everyone ought to be busy in Group."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Their tour continued through the massive ward for what seemed like forever. By the time they'd gotten through the nurses' central, the recreational rooms, the cafeteria, the gardens, and the group hall, Myde's feet were throbbing and his bag had beat a bruise into his thigh.

"And that brings us back to the lobby," Jane concluded with an easy smile. The nurse was not at all winded by their hike, as if she faced far more daunting courses all the time.

"Oh, Myde!" Belle looked up from her book to call, "could you come here for a second?" She waved a hand at him from behind the reception desk.

Jane sent him off with cheery "Good-day!" and Belle was talking before he even had a chance to reply to the nurse's farewell. In an odd way, he supposed their speed made up for their eccentricities. Belle was explaining something—probably something important—but all he could think was _You know? I might like it here_.

"Myde?" the receptionist's gentle voice filtered into his ear. "Myde!"

"Uwah! Sorry!" He rubbed sheepishly at the back of his blond mop head. "Could you repeat that?"

"I asked if Doctor Yen Sid signed your release and payroll forms." She smiled patiently up at him from her cushy seat.

"Yep, he did." The intern patted his patched and sewn-up messenger bag.

"Good. You need to get those forms to your advisor immediately, or you won't make the hospital's quarter payroll," Belle pressed as she sorted idly through a disheveled stack of papers.

"But if I don't get on the payroll, my university won't give me class credit!" Myde leaned heavily onto the desk's top to stop himself from running around in frustrated circles. "I won't be able to get my degree without those credits!"

The receptionist looked sympathetic to his whining. "Well, if you hurry, it won't be a problem."

"I'll go right now, thanks!" The blond boy took off in a limping run, nursing his aching feet.

"Oh wait, Myde!" Belle waved a hand again to stop him. "I almost forgot. Doctor Yen Sid sent down another packet for you." The intern came limping back to her desk. "It's a list of the patients you'll be working with and some of their basic information." She handed it over to him gently, as if it might crumble if she gripped it too tightly. "It's confidential hospital information, so please be careful with it."

The blond boy nodded along, slipping the packet into his messenger bag. As he scuttled out the front doors again, Belle went back to her book.

Myde hurried down the building's sidewalk toward the wall where he'd left his vehicle. Dull even as it sat in bright sunshine, the ancient yellow and blue moped looked like a properly-parked scrap heap, listing too far to the left. The kickstand had snapped off last week and the glue he'd used to reattach it wasn't working out so well. The faded pleather seat had been cracked and patched with duct tape so many times it was now impossible to see the black material under all the shiny silver tape. The entire bike creaked when he leapt onto it. Muttering a silent prayer to whoever was listening, Myde jammed the key into the ignition.

The cranky old gas engine coughed and chugged before dying.

"Come onnn," Myde smacked the moped's tank. "You can do it Flounder!" The engine chugged again and then caught, throwing a cloud of black smoke from the tail pipe. With an unsteady rumble, _Flounder _took off, putt-putting out into the Hospital parking lot. Keeping a wary eye open for ambulances, and steadying his bag over his leg, Myde cautiously steered his moped toward Dawn City University.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

After a brief scuffle in the lobby of DCU's Career Services office (pertaining to his lack of appointment), Myde had managed to hand over all the hospital payroll forms to his advisor, the scatterbrained but sweet Professor Godmother.

Professor Godmother, who handled all the Social Sciences career information, was the one who had pushed to get Myde an internship in the first place. She was exceptionally kind-hearted, and all the students loved her—which was sometimes, Myde sighed, a bad thing. If the line to see her ever got shorter than twenty people, it would have been a miracle.

Today, it seemed, was not Myde's day for miracles. He'd waited a nervous hour, praying she didn't decide to take a break before he had a chance to turn in his paperwork. The student in front of him had not even said good-bye before Myde was hurtling into his advisor's office, pelting her with the papers.

"Well Myde," Professor Godmother had giggled good-naturedly, "it good to see you again."

"I've got these forms and they gotta go in and I gotta get them cleared and agh!" Words failed him, but his flailing seemed to get the message across.

"Don't worry dear," she adjusted her glasses. "I'll get these in for you right away."

"Thank you!" Only the few lingering shards of his dignity kept the blond from hugging his advisor on the spot.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Myde finally wandered back down the well-lit hallways of the DCU Centrum. All his forms were in; he'd survived the first introduction… now he could relax until next week, when he'd start his internship for rea—

"Oi, Myde!" A cheery voice cut through his planning, and the blond spun about thoughtlessly on his sore heel. Through his wince, Myde caught sight of Yuffie. The chocolate-eyed girl was perched jauntily on a chair just inside the dining hall. She was waving him over wildly, but what really caught his aqua eyes was the tray of food on to the table in front of her. He'd gotten up ridiculously early to go on that hospital tour, and Jane hadn't even slowed down enough to let him think about lunch…

"Aren't you supposed to be in class right now?" Myde sighed. He sidled across the hall, up the two or three stairs that separated the dining hall from the corridor, and threw himself wearily down in a seat opposite from Yuffie.

"It's Spin Cycling," the black-haired girl moaned, "I could pass if I _never_ showed up." Myde reached across the unbalanced plastic table and stole a grease-and-salt-coated fry from Yuffie's tray. She shot him a poisonous glare and stabbed at his hand with a fork. The dirty blond boy jerked, tipping his chair backward to escape her wrath.

"Ack!" The shout was free of Myde's mouth before the chair was even halfway out from underneath him and the dining hall's dirty tile floor was rushing up and _it's gonna hur_—a pair of large hands caught his shoulders and effortlessly saved him from an untimely death on the ketchup-stained floor.

"Squall!" Yuffie cheered, nearly jumping over the table to reach one her favorite victims.

"It's Leon," several voices chimed at once. As Myde picked himself up, he caught sight of Tifa's mini-skirt and Cloud Strife's typical black turtleneck. Flashes of red and ebony around the table proved that Reno, Rude and Vincent had invaded the refectory as well. Amid the scrape of chairs being stolen from other tables and the clatter of food trays, Myde righted his own seat.

When he finally got back to actually sitting, the blond wasn't surprised to find Yuffie had shifted to make room for Vincent, putting the black-haired boy between herself and Reno.

Considering they were friends, Yuffie acted a lot like the red-head was her archenemy. Unfazed by her acidic glare, Reno snuck his hand across the table and toward Vincent's bright yellow plastic lunch tray. The action might have been more effective if the garish tabletop hadn't been sticky with uncountable soda spills. His hand squeaked and stuck, drawing Yuffie's eyes quicker than a diamond necklace could.

_Did she just—yes_, Myde blinked slowly, _she did just _hiss_ at Reno._

"Cloud and I are going to get the drinks; can I take your orders?" Tifa flashed her hostess grin. She looked young, but they'd all been to the restaurant she managed downtown. No place served better drinks than the _Seventh Heaven_, though Myde couldn't personally attest to that rumor: Tifa was strict about underage drinking and he was barely twenty.

A colorful mixture of sodas were called out (or muttered, in several cases) and Tifa jerked Cloud away by the wrist. He flapped behind her like a black and blond flag, shooting a long-suffering look back in their direction.

Without Tifa's cheeriness, the table seemed suddenly awkward and oppressively silent.

"Hey hey, could you pass me a fry?" Reno waved a hand at Tifa and Cloud's unguarded plates, staring beseechingly at Leon, who was closest. Myde snorted into his hand. As if Squall Leonhart could be swayed by such methods! When the brunet made no move to steal the food, Reno growled and grumbled to himself, turning a cursory blue-grey eye on Vincent's tray once again.

Looking between the silent forms of Rude and Leon, sitting stiffly on either side of him, Myde felt overly cheery. In an attempt to distract Yuffie (who looked like she might bite Reno's finger the next time it neared Vincent's tray), and in an attempt to liven up the aura of toxic stoicism that had settled over his own corner of the table, Myde leveled an aquamarine stare at them.

"So you guys are cutting class again?" he scolded, trying hard to sound reproachful. The attempt failed miserably; he wasn't even really sure what reproachful was supposed to sound like.

"No, Chem lab got canceled. Tifa, Cloud, and I have the same professor," Leon shrugged.

"Finished rounds early," Reno insisted as he tried to weave around Yuffie's fork (hovering protectively over Vincent's plate) to snatch a french fry. Somehow, Myde doubted the red-headed security guard and his partner had managed to patrol the entire campus already.

Vincent didn't bother to answer the question. But really, that was to be expected. The red-eyed boy was about as affable as a rock, as far as Myde went, and the only person who really got him to open up was—

"Oh boy," Yuffie groaned, "here comes trouble."

"Lucrecia…" Vincent buried his face in the high collar of his red trenchcoat, and though Myde only caught a glimpse, he was almost certain the older boy's cheeks were tinged the barest of pinks.

The beautiful brunette girl passed by their table quickly, without sparing so much as a glance in Vincent's direction. Instead, she wound around the lop-sided rows of tables and took a seat next to a greasy black-haired boy on the far side the dining hall, leaning over to straighten his glasses. Her pleasant laughter rang off the broad glass windows and echoed softly through the whole room.

Reno whistled suddenly, shattering the awkward silence that had fallen over their table.

"You should just get over her," Yuffie's voice was clipped and far colder than usual. Myde wondered—not for the first time—just why Yuffie hated Lucrecia so much.

"No, you should prove how much you love her…" Tifa's sudden reappearance almost sent Myde flying out of his chair in shock. Tight-lipped, the bar manager slammed her tray of beverages onto the table. It wobbled like it might fall, and only Rude's swift moves kept all the drinks from overturning. "You should steal her away from that ugly creep Hojo!" Tifa collapsed back into her chair with a huff.

Cloud set the rest of their drinks down far more gently. When he handed Vincent his Black Cherry Vanilla Coke, the blue-eyed boy paused.

"Vincent…" Cloud shook his head, blond spikes rustling against each other. Whatever words he'd meant to say died on his lips.

"I don't know man," Reno propped his feet up on their table and reclined in his cheap plastic chair, "any girl who'd choose that guy over you can't be all there upstairs." He swirled a finger around his temple. For once, Yuffie seemed to agree with him, nodding eagerly.

"She's nuts!"

Then someone changed the subject abruptly (Myde suspected it had been Leon, who seemed to have a knack for helping people out of tight places), engaging them all in a riveting conversation about the upcoming Chocobo races. Myde tried to pay attention to their bets on which bird would leave the others in the dust, but he ended up staring at Vincent. The moon-pale boy sat lifelessly, his face blank—still, something in his red eyes looked almost miserable.

It was odd. Vincent was his friend, right? Here was another human being –all right, maybe _human_ was debatable– sitting before him, miserable. And Myde didn't care. No, that wasn't right, he did care, really. He certainly didn't want Vincent to be depressed, but… He couldn't bring himself to be worried about it. Vincent's sadness didn't make _him_ sad. It was as if he suddenly couldn't remember how to _feel_ compassion. He really couldn't remember and for a minute it was like he was completely blank and _how do I feel happiness_ and _what's anger like_ and _why why why am I so_—the void was gone as soon as it had come and after another moment he felt… normal. A shuttering breath slipped past his lips; he could not bear to look at Vincent again.

Then, Reno cracked some joke about Cloud's hair that sent the table into gales of laughter. Effortlessly, Myde joined in. It was funny. It made him feel amused. It did.

Except all he really felt was empty.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde shuffled through the folders in his backpack, looking for a pen so he and Reno could play tic-tac-toe on a napkin. Last semester, they'd done it all the time: snatched stacks of napkins and coated them in tic-tac-toe boards, only to fold them up neatly and stick them back in the dispenser. It was always hilarious to see the other students' confused expressions when they reached for a clean napkin.

"Man, I hate messenger bags," the intern pouted. "You can't ever find the stuff you need!" _I should have listened when Mom told me to get a normal backpack…_ He caught sight of a pen at last, wedged under his folders. A low growl grew in the back of his throat as his hand caught and pinched on the edge of a binder. Surrendering finally, Myde started pulling the folders out and stacking them haphazardly on the table.

"What's this?" Yuffie's hand darted ninja-like over her tray to pick up a manila folder that had slipped free of the pile.

Myde looked up from his nearly successful hunt for the pen to see what she had grabbed. "Ack! That's my patient information; it's supposed to be confidential!" He waved an open hand desperately in her direction and leaned over the table in an attempt to reach the packet. Rude caught several drinks again as Myde bumped into them. "Yuffie, come on, give it back!" the dirty-blond boy whined.

She smiled and held it just out of his reach, pointedly going deaf to Tifa's complaints as Myde's hands flailed over their table. "You sound like a bratty five year old," the chocolate-eyed girl chuckled. With a pout reminiscent of a scolded cat, Myde flopped back into his chair, eyeing the packet in Yuffie's hands. He considered begging Vincent to get it back—Yuffie wouldn't say no to Vincent—but rejected the idea before it was fully born. Something about their red-eyed friend was making him feel uncomfortable today.

Myde ran a nervous hand through his toss-about blond hair. "My mom will kill me if this internship doesn't work out." The words seemed to stop everyone at the table in their tracks. Yuffie's grin faded; Cloud sank a bit in his chair.

"Yeah… No offense, yo, but your mom's a bitch," Reno growled, not at all repentant, even after Rude leveled a sharp stare in his direction. The red-head pulled back the feet he'd propped on their table and took to perching like a frog on his chair. The pose gave him a greater reach than before, and Reno launched into a rapid-fire attack on Vincent's remaining fries.

Myde ran a finger roughly over the tattered edge of the binder cover. The jagged plastic bit into his skin, but he hardly felt it. "I know my mom just wants me to have a future, but… she doesn't believe in anything I do."

Tifa looked torn between frustration and the desire to comfort him. "You know," she toyed with a ripped straw wrapper on the table, "it's not about what your mom wants. You should go after what _you_ want."

"_Music Theory is a major for druggies and people who aren't smart enough to get real degrees_," Yuffie drawled a snide impersonation of his mother. "_We can't have people thinking that about you, can we My'?_" The charcoal-haired girl sat up rod-straight to level a deceptively calm stare in his direction. "_We'd be so much happier if you got a degree in something useful_." She balled up her trash in jerky, white-knuckled motions.

Silently, Vincent pried the shredded napkins from Yuffie's grip and tossed them with his own leftovers. They were all so used to the black-haired boy's quiet manner—everyone was already piling their garbage on Vincent's empty tray before Myde had the commonsense to ask "are you gonna dump the trash?"

Vincent nodded slowly, half of his face disappearing inside the high collar of his trenchcoat. Balancing the mountain of crumbled napkins, soda cups and paper bags with an unnatural ease, he cut a steady pace across the room to the garbage cans.

"You're not taking this internship just because of your mother, are you?" Leon's sudden question sounded a bit like a rebuke—and Reno's dry laugh only ground the censure in.

"It's all right," Myde was able to smile truthfully (for the first time since he'd sat down to lunch), "I really do like psychology. You get to talk to all sorts of people."

"So you actually get to work with people on this internship?" Cloud asked, looking interested—a rarity for the normally distant boy.

"Yep!" Myde shuffled through his folder for the facility guidelines Belle had given him. He handed the folder to Leon, who set it down on the table where Cloud could read the contents too. "I asked the ward director if I could focus on patients suffering from delusions. I'm going to use my analyses for a thesis paper once I go for my Maste—"

"Who are these people?" Yuffie's voice cut him off. Myde was confused for only a second before something like fear caught in his throat. Yuffie had opened the confidential patient information folder and was looking through it. She plucked out a page and glanced over it before tossing it aside carelessly.

A heavy dread settled in Myde's stomach. And he couldn't even tell them not to share the confidential information with anyone else because then Yuffie would _want_ to tell and… Urgh. Myde felt a migraine coming on. It's not like his friends would ever come into contact with the patients, right? So if they saw a few pictures, it wouldn't be a big deal. Right? Oh god, if this somehow got back to Yen Sid…

Vincent's return startled him momentarily from his macabre thoughts. Myde got caught up wondering what had taken the red-eyed boy so long to throw the trash away—and then he remembered that Lucrecia's table was near the trash cans. Vincent had probably lingered there as long as he could.

"Hey," Yuffie's sudden whistle startled him, "this guy's cute!"

"You think every boy you see is cute," Reno barked through his sneer.

"I don't think you're cute," the chocolate-eyed girl shot back, with a smirk of her own. "What's that say about you?"

"Yeah, this guy isn't half bad," Tifa muttered, leaning over to stare at the no-longer-confidential information. "But he can't hold a candle to Cloud." Leon coughed (a poor attempt at covering a snigger) and the blond himself flushed light red. His brilliant blue eyes slid away from the black-haired girl, finding a speckle on the table to be suddenly captivating.

"Who are you looking at?" Myde queried quickly, saving Cloud from further embarrassment. He wished someone would distract _him_ from his anxiety.

Yuffie's mahogany eyes roamed the paper in search of a name. "The blue-haired one…" she muttered at last.

"That's… Zexion, right?" Myde offered, running mentally down the list of names he'd skimmed earlier.

"Um, no. It says his name's 'Ienzo'," Yuffie said. Having seen enough, she stacked the papers and pushed them back across the table.

The blue-haired boy's picture stared blindly upward, all hard eyes and an expressionless mouth. His already pale skin looked even more bleached because of the white cotton hospital top he was wearing. Ienzo.

"I must have misread it," Myde shrugged. But he'd been so sure…

"How'd you make a mix-up like that man?" Reno stood, stretching his stiff muscles.

"Yes," Vincent's cool, deep voice was barely above a whisper. "There's no _X_ in Ienzo…"

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Τ ђ ε – Μυşίċίąη : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

1) As always, crazy amounts of credit go to my beta-reader, **Distorted Gaze**. I don't think this fanfiction would be here if not for her!

2) Thirty reviews. Wow! I never imagined I would get that many for one chapter. I love you all. As I said last time, this is my first Kingdom Hearts fanfiction, and I would _really_ appreciate any and all constructive criticism. **Please review!**


	3. The Stage is Set

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ I _

Ρŗεłυđε – τ σ – ă – Ń ε ω – Ċσηċεŗŧσ :

Τ ђ ε – Ŝŧąġε – ί ş – Ŝ ε ŧ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Monday began as every day did in Dawn City—exquisitely. Swirls of indigo and amber lit the sky like the background of a surreal painting, broken only by the glassy black shapes of skyscrapers. The east-facing windows of Rufus Memorial Hospital glittered a blinding gold and Myde squinted against the light as he and his moped puttered into the parking lot. _Flounder_'s engine clunked to a stop and the dirty-blond intern slipped lazily off the duct-taped seat. He raised both hands to rub his eyes. _Too early_…

Stifling one last yawn, Myde straightened from his half-slump, plucking at windswept and tangled blond strands of hair and trying to sort them into some semblance of tidiness. As Myde approached the hospital the automatic doors _whoosh-_ed open, catching him in a chilly blast of already cool air.

Belle looked up from her newest book and smiled when her brown eyes landed on the intern. "Good morning," she waved gently from her place behind the front desk.

He replied with a gurgle that sounded something like a mixture of sick hippo and trodden-on mouse. "Mor…ning," he managed finally. After another yawn that made something in his ears ring, he grumbled, "I haven't had to get up so early since morning marching band practice… in high school."

"Well, the city is quite beautiful at this hour," she smiled. "It's worth waking up early to see it."

_No, not really_, Myde thought, but kept it to himself. Belle really did look happy about their city's perfect sunrise—he didn't want to bring her down.

"Oh! You've got to get started," she said suddenly, as if just realizing Myde was there to work, not to talk. She bent to riffle through the reception desk's drawers without explanation. Leaning over the rim of the desk to watch, Myde caught her quiet mutter. "Where is that key? I'm certain I put it right…"

"Key?"

"Here is it." She sat up, pushing a small bronze key over the desk's top. "It's for your locker. Jane must have shown you the locker room…" Belle breezed on without waiting for a reply, her voice slipping from bright to professional in seconds. "Your uniform will be there. You should go get dressed while I call Doctor Gainsborough."

"Doctor Gainsborough… she's my supervisor right?"

Belle nodded gently. "She'll show you what to do."

"Okay," Myde thanked the brunette receptionist and, with a wave, started off around the front desk. He managed to take three steps before stopping dead in his tracks. "Erm," he turned to grin sheepishly back at Belle, "where was the locker room again?"

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The locker room was utterly empty—cold in that sterile way that only hospital rooms could be. Someone had opened the window blinds, but the windows were all facing west, catching barely a hint of the morning sun. Myde hunted along the wall for a light switch, squinting when his hands bumped it and the halogen ceiling lamps flared to life.

The same checkered tile floor that spread throughout the ward pervaded the locker room, flecked and scuffed from more use than some of the other rooms saw. The lockers themselves were wide rather than tall, and stacked one on top of the other like squat crates. Dark blue-green paint covered their faces, flaking off in a few places to reveal browning metal underneath.

Half-way across the room, there was a notecard (with Myde's name scrawled on it in neat, even letters) taped to a locker in the middle of the second row. He wandered toward the locker slowly and slid out of his messenger bag with only a little difficulty. Dropping the tattered bag on the low wooden bench that ran around the room, Myde bent to pull the notecard off his new locker. A tarnished silver number plaque glared up at him, numerals still all too legible.

"Locker number… sixty-nine. Nice," he muttered to the empty room.

Myde slotted the gouged bronze key into the lock with only a little trouble, and the metal door swung open with a barely audible creak. A bundle of dark blue clothing, wrapped in loose, clear plastic, sat patiently at the bottom of the locker as if waiting for him. He could feel the starched stiffness of the clothing as he picked it up, and in the silent room, the plastic bag's crinkling seemed to echo.

He tore the clear coating off with only a little difficulty, flapping out first a navy shirt and then the obligatory drawstring pants. Both articles of clothing looked several sizes too big; wrinkles from the folds were pressed so deeply into the cloth that Myde wondered if they'd ever come out.

His aquamarine eyes darted about momentarily, searching for a connecting bathroom to change in. There weren't any doors except the one he had come through, and wandering out of an already empty room in search of a place to change seemed silly. Shrugging, Myde peeled the black _Kingdom Come_ t-shirt off his back and dropped it haphazardly on top of his messenger bag. The blue scrub was itchy as he pulled it over his bare skin and it smelled like plastic and ammonia. The shirt bagged rigidly off his shoulders, V-neck falling past his collarbone.

Myde undid the button and zipper of his jeans and shucked them like a snake shedding its skin, shivering a little as the freezing air brushed his bare legs. Just as he was balancing uneasily on one foot, pulling the navy drawstring pants up over his other ankle, Myde suddenly caught the sound of footsteps echoing in the hall outside the locker room.

"Ack, somebody's coming!" The intern struggled to get the uniform pants around his knees while skittering away from the door. Unfortunately, he had forgotten the bench behind him, and as he bumped into it, Myde couldn't stop his feet flying out from beneath him, slamming him backward over the wooden surface. His head, cushioned only by his unruly mop of blond hair, hit the tile floor with a jarring crack.

The locker room door opened with a creak, but Myde was too dazed to pick himself up off the bench or even look over at whoever had entered the locker room. Lifting a hand that shook from shock and adrenaline, he ran his fingers between the tile floor and his bruised skull.

_There's gonna be a lump the size of Hollow Bastion there tomorrow_, he groaned mentally and then groaned again, aloud, at his own thoughts. _Now I know my head's not all right. What the heck's a_ Hollow Bastion?

"Are you all right?" a man's voice called, but he didn't sound very concerned.

Rather than answering, Myde hastily reached back over the bench and dragged the uniform pants over his knees. One of the legs caught for a second on the hem of his dolphin-print boxers, but the uniform bottom was so loose one irritated flap it was enough to get the barely-pleated top over his hips. After he'd tightened it enough to even be considered a fit, a good foot of the drawstring was left dangling free. He tied a knot in the string as well as he could, his arms still sluggish and tingeing in pain from the impromptu tumble he had yet to stand up from. _From now on, I'm changing at home!_

"I asked if you were all right." The voice was as calm as before, but somehow it still stung like a slap.

"I was too busy dying of brain damage to answer, sorry," Myde growled, finally feeling capable of turning his head. As soon as he did, his aquamarine eyes landed on a stiff, dark-haired man whose pale face was marred by a scowl. There was a nightstick on the man's belt and also something that looked suspiciously like a gun holster—a hospital security guard obviously, probably on his morning rounds.

"Eh heh," Myde giggled nervously. "I mean… I'm totally fine!" He picked himself up shakily, shuddering when black spots swam across his vision. Before they had cleared away completely, the security guard was already crossing the room.

"I'd like to see your identification and clearance badge now," the dark-haired man demanded.

"Eh…" Myde twitched a bit under the security guard's glare—the man's face didn't look any different, but his dark eyes glittered with impatience. Myde fought hard to hold back more nervous giggling. "I'm the new intern… I haven't got a badge yet, but…"

One of the man's dark eyebrows lifted suspiciously as he surveyed the intern, like he doubted anything as unkempt as the blond could ever be in hospital employ. Then, disbelief was easily wiped away by frustration. The part of Myde that wasn't busy being intimidated wondered how someone could look so calm and so scary at the same time.

"If you cannot procure clearance, I am going to have to ask you to return to the indicated visitor areas."

"But I—oh!" Myde brightened. "I've got a _paper_!" Without further explanation he leant over and pulled his messenger bag out from beneath his clothes, wincing as his bruised back complained about the motion. The dark-haired man crossed his arms, looking like he wouldn't be startled even if Myde pulled a dancing monkey out of his backpack. "Erm, I know it's in here somewhere…"

Myde shuffled through the papers in his folders again, searching desperately for the clearance letter Belle had given him when he'd come last week for introduction. A bead of sweat rolled down the line of his jaw. "I really had it," he insisted. "Miss Belle gave it to me! Look—" he waved the little bronze key for his locker. "She gave me this key this morning! Besides, I wouldn't be putting on this uniform if I didn't _have_ to!"

Dark eyes blinked once before a hand closed like a steel trap around Myde's upper-arm.

"You're going to have to leave the staff area now."

"Buuutttt—" Myde barely had time to snatch his bag and clothes before the security guard hauled him out of the locker room and back toward the lobby.

"Belle!" the intern whined when they'd made their way out of the halogen-lit hallways and toward the hospital's entrance. "Help me!"

"Tseng!" The brunette receptionist jumped to her feet, waving an almost defensive hand, as if trying to catch the security guard's attention and simultaneously wanting to avoid him. Her brown eyes were wide in a surprised stare. "What are you doing? He's our new intern!"

Tseng, as Myde had learned, didn't seem at all upset about being told he had just accosted the hospital's newest employee. Instead he continued walking, letting go of Myde only after they'd reached Belle's desk.

"I lost my clearance paper," Myde admitted, although he had strong suspicion that Yuffie had been the one to lose it, when she'd haphazardly riffled through his folder last week. Belle just giggled through a bright smile (as if she'd expected him to lose the paper all along) and dropped breezily back into her desk chair.

"I'll print you a new one," she said, turning her swivel seat toward her computer's keyboard.

Tseng nodded stiffly, sending Myde a cool and humbling look. "Perhaps this will teach you a lesson in responsibility." The dark-haired man turned on his heel and paced away, vanishing into the hallways like a menacing wraith off in search of more victims.

"Oh my God," Myde sighed in relief once Tseng was out of sight. "They ought to admit that guy to this ward—he's completely paranoid. What person in their right mind would break into a hospital and put on a scrub for fun?"

"Actually," Belle laughed, "we have quite a few break-ins."

"Are you serious?" Myde blinked.

"Activists who dislike psychiatric wards break in to cause trouble, addicts sneak in to try and steal pills, people sometimes try to help their friends and family members escape… I've seen almost everything!" The brunette woman seemed happy at the level of strange excitement the hospital got. "Don't be too upset with Tseng," she continued, "he does mean well. It's just… sometimes I think his sense of 'responsibility' is larger than his heart."

"Sure," Myde rolled his eyes. "Personally, I think he's got a stick stuffed somewhere the sun doesn't shine…" He winced as the lump on the back his head throbbed dully. "Urgh, I'm gonna take this stuff back to my locker," he waved his shirt unhappily.

"I paged Doctor Gainsborough but she didn't answer," Belle said, pushing a stack of books on her desk out of the way. "I'll call her again right now."

Hoping Tseng was not lurking somewhere between the lobby and the locker room, Myde set off slowly down the hallways for the third time that morning.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

When Myde came back from the locker room a few minutes later, Belle was standing at the front desk, looking more preoccupied than normal.

"I'm sorry, Aer—Doctor Gainsborough can't come down and get you." Belle's face was alight with curiosity. "There's some sort of trouble going on upstairs. You should probably just wait here…" But the way she said it made it seem like she'd rather be upstairs herself, instead of sitting at her desk.

"Maybe I could go help?" Myde offered, more worried about being reported late for his first day of work than anything else.

Belle seemed to deliberate for a moment with herself, torn between being a responsible member of the hospital staff by telling him to stay put, or sending him upstairs anyway. After a moment, her curious side won out—the side willing to break minor protocol to send someone on an adventure. Giving Myde an almost conspiratorial smile, Belle handed him his new clearance letter, neatly folded, and waved him toward the elevator.

"Second floor," she murmured behind her hand, as if someone was listening.

After having seen Tseng the security guard, Myde wondered if someone just _might_ be.

A nod was the only answer he gave before hurrying around the desk and toward the elevators. He almost tripped over the hem of one of his pant legs, and only the lift's dull-white door kept him from falling over for the second time that day. The chime of the doors was already becoming familiar to him, and Myde stumbled over the inch-wide gap between the tiled lobby floor and the bottom of the lift.

There wasn't any cheesy music playing, so he hummed some pointless tune while the rattling elevator ascended a floor. The fluorescent light gave the enclosing metal walls an eerie luster and he couldn't stop himself from shuddering. _This is just like that scene in Silent Hill when_—the elevator doors creaked slowly open.

As if it _had_ come straight out of the hospital scene in Myde's favorite horror movie, a blur of silver and venomous green suddenly plowed down the hallway straight at the elevator, screeching as it came.

"AGHHHHHHHHHH!" Myde screamed as the monstrous blur slammed into his middle, pitching him backward into the lift's metal wall and adding more bruises to his already throbbing head. "Oh God!" the intern shouted as he tried to throw the creature off. "_PUPPET NURSE_! PLEASE, DON'T EAT ME! I taste like stringy band geek!"

The monster attached to Myde's chest laughed. "You're crazy," it said.

_No steel pipes? No revolvers? No decaying flesh slurps?_ Myde cracked an aquamarine eye open cautiously to meet an acid green-blue stare.

"Uh?" He couldn't quite figure out what else to say, and the small, silver-haired child sitting on his chest and peering curiously at him made no move to stand.

"Kadaj!" a brown-haired woman yelled, as she hurried down the hall toward the elevator, her high-heeled shoes clicking on the tile floor. Though there were other things he should have been paying attention to, her uniform was what caught Myde's eye. _So pink, like cotton candy…_

"Oof!" The intern winced as the green-eyed boy, Kadaj apparently, used Myde's body as a springboard to launch himself across the elevator. The boy slammed his hands against the button panel repeatedly, too busy watching the approaching woman to watch which buttons he was pressing.

"I'm gonna find Mother and nobody's gonna stop me!" Kadaj's indignant howl echoed down the hallway.

The brunette doctor crossed the last few feet between them in a run, sliding her arm through the closing elevator doors and causing them to spring back open. "Kadaj, please," she said in a sweet voice that Myde liked instantly, "I understand how you feel, but there's no time for this today—"

"She won't love me anymore! I have to find Mother!" The boy's voice was a cross between a drawling whine and a snarl that sounded awkward coming from such a small body. Sighing, the cotton-candy-colored woman tried to pull the boy's hands away from the button panel (where he was inadvertently hitting the Door Open button as often as the Door Close). Kadaj jerked back out of her hold, drawing himself up to his full-height—which was barely above her waist.

Deliberately, the boy lifted one sneakered foot and kicked the woman hard in the shin. His sneakers were the light-up type, and as soon as he made contact with her leg, the heel sparkled green. If the woman hadn't grimaced in pain, Myde would have laughed. Climbing to his feet sluggishly, the intern caught the little boy under the arms and lifted him away from the pink-clad doctor.

"Put me down!" Kadaj pouted, kicking his light-up sneakers back into Myde's chest.

_I'm going to be nothing _but_ bruises by the time I get out of here_, Myde whined to himself.

The green-eyed doctor hurried to get the elevator doors open, apologizing quietly as she did it.

"Elena!" She waved to a blonde woman down the hall. "A little help?"

The new woman surged toward them in a brisk walk, and Myde noticed she was dressed in the hospital's security uniform. He immediately tensed, fearing a run-in with someone else like Tseng, but the new woman's face looked more harried than anything, and she managed a half-smile when she looked at him.

The security woman—Elena, Myde thought her name was—reached out and took Kadaj from him, wincing at the volume of the boy's shrill wails. He thrashed in her hold, but Elena seemed used to his antics, trapping him between her hip and arm so that his tiny fists struck mostly air.

"Stop wriggling around, you little worm!" she growled, pulling on one of his ears with her lacquered fingernails.

"Let me go!" Kadaj cried. "I've got to find her…" His bright green eyes wavered and filled with water. Tears overflowed, leaving trails over his cheeks.

"Please take him back to his room," the pink-clad doctor sighed. "Loz and Yazoo _should_ still be there." Elena nodded in answer, shifting the silver-haired boy to her other arm when he attempted to bite at her starched black sleeve in a last act of defiance.

"MO-MOTHERRR!" Kadaj's tear-choked voice trailed off as the blonde security guard hurried back down the hall.

"I am so sorry about that," the brunette woman smiled, but it looked a little sad too. She ran a hand across her pink scrub, brushing out wrinkles that were not there. "Kadaj… His mother died a few years ago, and he and his brothers haven't been able to accept that. He's convinced that someone bad has taken her away, and that he's the only one who can find her."

"That's… terrible." Myde wasn't sure what else to say, because he really couldn't imagine being in that place and—

"I'm Aerith Gainsborough, by the way. You're our new intern aren't you?" Her green eyes were inviting and warm, and the edge of tension that had been with Myde since the day began started to unwind.

"Yes!" Myde exclaimed, as he hurried to shake her hand. "Miss Belle said you'd explain things better for me."

"Of course," Aerith smiled brightly, but leaned to rub her shin where Kadaj had kicked her. Her smile fell a little. "Your focus is on delusional disorders, right?"

Myde nodded in answer, "Yeah, for my thesis paper, to get into Grad school."

"Kadaj is one of the patients I work closely with, and who you'll work with as well. He really can be a sweet boy…" Aerith mused. Somehow, the sandy-blond intern doubted that. She shook her head sadly for a moment, as if chasing unpleasant thoughts away.

"Well, you can shadow me for today, just to get the flow of things—I'll explain your duties as we go," Aerith said, working her normally soft voice into a stronger, professional tone. Myde fell into step beside her, willing himself to pay close attention and not make any mistakes.

"This month, I start each day by greeting the patients on my roster," she explained. "Our ward works on a rotational basis. Each class of disorder has its own dedicated staff that exchanges duties based on a monthly schedule. I'm a member of the neuropsychiatric division of the ward, which handles neurological and cognitive disorders."

Myde felt a headache coming on that had nothing to do with the bumps on the back of his head. Brain disorders and rotating staff duties, he got that much.

"Right now, under Yen Sid's guidance, the ward is operating two different methods of psychiatric therapy. We use clinical psychotherapy in conjunction with medical and biological emphases in the assessment and treatment of our patients. You're following me?"

"I think so," Myde smiled sheepishly. He'd just had these classes in college; the knowledge should have come quickly and easily to him. But it was a struggle to follow her, and Myde was quickly realizing that just because he'd gotten fairly good grades in his psychology classes, didn't mean that his book learning could be applied to the real world. "You're saying the ward uses personal counseling treatment but also uses medication to help patients."

Aerith nodded, pleased that Myde knew enough to understand her without having everything explained. "Each branch of mental illness has two or three main psychiatrists and a set of nurses. Doctor Shera and I were the doctors assigned to disorders dealing with self-perception and disassociation with reality. It was quite a coincidence," she frowned sadly, "that you were interested in delusional patients and Doctor Shera just happened to have an accident."

Myde winced, feeling the first heavy push of guilt in the back of his throat. It wasn't _his_ fault Doctor Shera had been hit by an ambulance! But Aerith's face brightened with a small smile as they continued down the hall, taking a right, into another endless hallway. The hospital was like a maze, really…

"Each psychiatrist has a set list of patients, whom we speak with on a daily basis. Other than mandatory private counseling, in-patients attend Group once a week and are expected to interact with each other."

"That's the basic idea in psychotherapy, right?" Myde mused, trying to remember all the terms from his psychology textbooks. "Building steady relationships between doctors and patients?"

Aerith nodded slowly, breaking her professional air for a moment. "I think," she started, "that medication, scientific explanations… they can only go so far. When it comes down to it, we all need to be accepted. We depend so much on other people… Just having someone to talk to, to trust—it really means a lot to our patients."

Her walk slowed until she was standing still, skin and clothing almost glowing as they were brushed by golden sunlight ghosting through the hallway windows. "It means a lot to _me_," she murmured. "I love helping the patients, seeing them smile… Maybe it's silly," she smiled, "but when I see them getting better, when I see them happy… I feel like I'm making a difference." She paused, as if reluctant to say any more, but then she shook her head, smile drifting to a fond and almost sheepish look. "Sometimes I feel like I'm saving their lives."

_Saving their lives_… Myde didn't know how to answer her or even how to feel. Was it really that important, having someone to talk to? He threw the question away as soon as he thought it. It _was_ that important. Even here—especially here—people had to reach out to others. No one could live completely alone, without someone to laugh with, to trust…

The thought that _he_ might have the responsibility to be that way—to be someone's guidance, someone's savior—sent a shiver down his spine.

Aerith seemed like she was meant to save lives; Myde knew he was not.

"I'm sorry," the brunette shook off her thoughts, straightening where she stood, "let's go on." She started walking down the endless hallway again, and the click of her heels, echoing in soft waves like ripples in a pond, was the only sound for a long moment.

"Where was I…" she lifted a hand to tap against her lower lip in thought. "Oh, schedules. Typically, patients have several recreational hours every day. That's when we handle our paperwork." Even her weary sigh sounded pleasant and upbeat.

_Paperwork…_ Myde groaned to himself, already seeing mounds of disorderly records spilling out around him.

"Right now, aside from my standard counseling sessions, I'm in charge of morning greetings for our division and lunch supervision. Side duties like those are usually rotated between the staff, but since you're here, everyone will probably try to shove that extra work off on you." She giggled teasingly at his incredulous stare.

"Actually, I was in the middle of morning greetings when Kadaj got away from me." Aerith turned to look at a wall clock down the hallway. "And if I don't hurry and finish greetings, I'll be late to counseling." She picked up their pace a little, taking another few turns in the hospital labyrinth that Myde knew he'd never be able to remember.

"Do you know why we have morning greeting?" Aerith asked, kindly as ever, though Myde got the feeling he was being tested.

"Uh," Myde stuttered, striding to keep up with her. "Uh… routine?" Aerith smiled, and he knew he'd hit on the right idea. Pages of his textbooks flashed before him, bringing up lessons he'd thought he'd forgotten. Proud that he was able to offer her one sure answer, Myde barreled on. "Building a routine helps to reassure patients. It makes them feel stable and more… normal."

"That's right, but there's a simple reason too," Aerith said, tossing a fly-away strand of brown hair back over her shoulder. "It's just nice to have someone to say good morning to."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde was hopelessly lost by the time they finally stopped in front of a vivid blue door.

"Almost all the patients in our division live in this wing," the pink-clad doctor waved a hand down the hallway and back. "I've already greeted most of them, but the others are probably wondering why I'm late." She bent to slide her plastic clearance badge through the door's locking mechanism.

"This is Ariel's room. If you got the patient information from Yen Sid, you should know a bit about her."

Briefly, the picture of a girl with red hair and blue eyes flashed in his mind, but Myde had trouble holding on to it. He'd only brushed over the patient information, too confused about his mix-up between "Ienzo" and "Zexion" and too tired from everything else to do much more than look at names and pictures.

"She suffers from a very unique delusion," Aerith said as she pushed Ariel's door in slowly; Myde heard it hit and bump things out of its way as it swung open.

"Aerith!" A slender, red-headed girl was tumbling into them before they'd even taken two steps into the room. "Aerith, please! I've got to help him! Ursula will—" Her gaze moved from the brunette doctor to Myde, and there was something desperate and deep in her wide blue eyes that stilled his breath and did not allow him to look away.

The brunette doctor drew a long, slow breath.

Aerith's slender hands rose to gently pry away the fingers Ariel had fisted in her pink scrub. Myde watched as, for a moment, Aerith gripped the red-headed girl's hands like the touch had so much more meaning—like she meant to help by their contact alone.

"You didn't take your medication this morning, did you Ariel?" Aerith forced away any waver in the words as she pointed to an untouched pair of pills in a dish on Ariel's nightstand.

"I don't need medicine!" Ariel turned away from them, huffing in desperation. "I'm not crazy!"

"I know you're not, Ariel… If you don't take your medication, the nurses will be upset." Aerith's voice was steady, practiced calm evident in its sweet tone. Myde could do nothing but stand beside her, unsure of what to say or even if he should say anything at all. Ariel wavered on her feet, one fragile hand pressing red finger marks into her other forearm.

In the seconds of silence, Myde's eyes drifted away from the two women and struggled to take in the entirety of Ariel's room. There was no way to describe it, he thought, half in awe. There were things _everywhere_. The strangest assortment of things—tobacco pipes, dolls, music boxes, figurines and jewelry, photo albums and decorative glass bottles; more things than he could begin to name sat on rows and rows of shelves, cluttered, but seeming somehow orderly as well. There was a stack of umbrellas behind the door (they must have made the noise he'd heard when they came in) and the sluggish breeze in the wind blew music from the ten or so odd sets of wind chimes suspended from the shelves. They looked strange, and when he took a closer look, Myde realized that, instead of metal tubes, the wind chimes were strung with silver forks.

There were clouds painted over the pale blue of the ceiling; Aerith was talking in that quiet, serious tone again, but her words hardly registered in Myde's head as he surveyed the room. It was unlike anything he had ever seen in a hospital and beyond anything he had ever imagined, walking into Rufus Memorial. An almost overwhelming urge to open the ornate music box on the shelf nearest to him swept suddenly over Myde, and he gave in without even thinking.

The box lid lifted open easily, spilling steady, twinkling music in to the room like the drum of raindrops on a windowpane. Ariel and Aerith jerked, gazing over at him with almost identical looks of surprise.

"Eh heh, sorry?" Myde shut the music box's lid quickly but carefully. He hadn't seen the inside of the box for long, but he was sure there'd been a tiny figurine in there, of a girl with a fish's tail for legs.

Ariel turned back to Aerith, shaking her head vehemently to some part of their interrupted conversation. "I don't want to. I need to find Eric, he's in trouble!" Aerith's face slipped slowly into a surprisingly serious expression, one that made Myde feel small.

"Please take your medication Ariel," the brunette doctor said with that ever-present sweetness. Aerith's voice had a stronger edge to it now, the intern couldn't help but think.

Ariel opened her mouth as if to protest more, but one look at Aerith's firm green eyes made the red-head slump in her white hospital clothing. "I just," she murmured, "need to see Eric." Aerith sent Myde an apologetic glance and followed Ariel through another, smaller door in the side of the room. Presumably it led to a bathroom, where Aerith could get water and make Ariel take the pills that she'd carried with her into the annex.

Myde tapped his foot idly against the tile floor, feeling more like a shadow than a shadower, with each passing moment. Doctor Gainsborough didn't expect him to do anything right now, did she? Should he have helped her convince Ariel? A niggling sense of concern wormed through the back of his mind. _I haven't screwed up already, have I? _Myde lifted a hand and bit nervously at his fingernail, feeling the brush of the calloused fingertip against his lips.

"All right, hurry up and get ready or you'll be late to breakfast." Aerith said to Ariel, sounding relieved as they came out of the bathroom. The green-eyed doctor crossed the room toward Myde, stepping gingerly over a scattered set of marbles. "Come on, we're getting later and later." She pushed him gently ahead of her by his elbow, echoing his polite call of "good-bye" to Ariel.

Myde watched the red-headed girl, staring silently out her window, until the blue door closed and locked behind them.

Aerith sighed, and the blond intern realized she wasn't really as relieved as she'd acted. "I'm sorry," the brunette muttered. "She's normally not like this at all." Suddenly, in the dusty sunlit hall, Aerith looked very tired.

"You were saying… that Ariel has a strange delusion?" Myde made an attempt at distracting her. "I didn't see it. She just seemed really hung up on that Eric guy to me…"

Aerith's green eyes fell to the floor; dark eyelashes brushed her cheeks as she blinked slowly.

"That's just the problem Myde… Eric doesn't exist."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Something had settled inside Myde, buoying in his stomach like a thick and slimy layer of oil over water. Tendrils of it tried to sneak upward from his middle—they weren't strong enough to even reach his heart.

Myde couldn't put a name to the _something_ either. Not quite guilt, not sadness… _Hollow_, _again._ He never said the word, but somehow it still turned sour on his tongue. Coughing once, to rid his mouth of that hot, indefinable tang, Myde looked over at Aerith.

They'd stopped in front of another door, only a few feet from the first. If the doors described the occupants they held in, in any way, Myde was certain the person behind _this_ one had to be an eccentric. The door had, probably, once been white—like most of the doors in the hospital—but paint had been wildly smeared across it, turning the plain portal into a painter's palette of colors. Thick purple coated most of it, covered over by strokes of russet, yellow, aqua and pink.

When he leaned back to try and see the whole thing at once, Myde realized the shapes weren't completely random. Instead, they formed the strangest-looking leaves and flowers he'd ever seen. Someone had scrawled the words _Lotus Forest_ near the very top of the door, which only served to confuse him: none of the painted flowers were lotuses.

Strangest of all, Myde thought, was the doorknob. There wasn't any lock on it—at least not a lock like the other doors had. Rather than a slot for a clearance card, there was a heavy gold doorknob with an old-fashioned keyhole cut beneath it. Odder still, someone had glued googly plastic eyeballs just above the knob. Those eyes seemed to be staring up at him quite expectantly, though Myde blamed his overactive imagination for that thought.

"Hhmmm…" Aerith inclined her head toward the door as if listening for noise from the other side. Her green-eyes narrowed slightly in surprise as the room behind the door stayed silent. "I wonder what sort of mood he's in this morning…"

"What?"

"Normally he wakes up singing. He hasn't been this quiet in a long time…" A thoughtful expression danced across her face as she straightened. "Well, anyway," hushed laughter chased traces of concern from her eyes, "this next patient is one of our most… intriguing cases. He'll either delight you, or drive you up the walls."

Myde didn't quite like the amused glint to Aerith's smile. "What sort of disorder does he have?"

The doctor's amused smile became all-out teasing when she said "severe bipolarity. So severe in fact, that it declined into a case of clinical lycanthropy."

Myde could only blink blankly in reply.

"He believes that he's a cat." Without any further explanation, Aerith reached out, turned the doorknob, and walked easily into the room.

"It… wasn't even locked?" Myde followed her after a momentary staring match with the knob.

"Actually, most of our patients' rooms aren't locked," Aerith said. "We only lock the rooms of patients who try to run from the facility, or patients who are considered dangerous."

But Myde hardly heard her comment—he was too busy trying to take in the rest of the room. Unlike Ariel's room, which was filled to the brim, this space was relatively bare of accessories. What it lacked in clutter it more than made up for in color: the paint from the door bled over all the walls, dropping Myde and Aerith in the dead center of a two-dimensional forest. The wild colors alone were enough to make him gawk, but the paint continued over the ceiling, tracing out a canopy of trees and what looked like butterflies made of bread slices.

"Chester, where are you?" Aerith called.

At exactly that moment, Myde realized he and Aerith were alone in the room.

"Chester, come out please." Aerith's voice was tinged with only a hint of impatience. Myde was just about ready to say _this room needs a lock after all _when loud and shuddery laughter rang out from behind them. The giggles slunk along Myde's spine, cold and shocking, like someone had dropped an ice-cube down his shirt.

"My, my…" A lilting, curious voice swam out of the laughter just as Myde spun on his heel, eyes darting about in search of a source.

For a long moment, Myde was certain there was no one there at all, but then, as if a person had suddenly _swept_ into being, Myde's gaze wrapped around the strangest man he had ever seen. Draped bonelessly on his stomach over the top of a tall dresser beside the door, the man's legs folded and unfolded in the air behind him. He dropped his tousled head onto the tops of his half-crossed arms like a napping cat.

_He was there all along_, Myde thought,_ and I just didn't _see_ him._

The stranger's laughter alone had had the intern shuddering, and seeing the body that voice belonged to made it no less eerie—a short mop of indigo and hot pink hair flew haphazardly over a cream face, and a white grin cracked the man's skull from ear to ear. But it was the yellow, lamp-like eyes that caught Myde's gaze and would not let him go. Pinpoint black pupils rolled over him in a silent assessment, and the man's face split impossibly farther open. At last the contracted pupils ceased their roving and settled heavily on Myde's own aquamarine eyes.

It was suddenly as if Myde was being seen through, riffled, searched, re-sorted, broken down into a thousand tiny pieces and re-built incorrectly. Distantly, he could feel Aerith standing behind him, but it was as if she was in another world—or as if _he_ had stepped out of the real world completely. The yellow-eyed man chortled again, and like a falling sheet of satin or water overflowing a glass, he slipped from the top of the dresser toward Myde.

Those lamp-bright eyes never looked away, and Myde pulled hastily back from the man's fluid approach. Aerith made some cautionary noise behind them.

"Chester..." she warned, but the feline-like man either did not hear her or did not care.

"I wonder…" The yellow-eyed man's voice was a wild swing of inflection, bubbling with barely restrained laughter. It was high and dark, ringing in Myde's head like the peal of a bell he couldn't block out. It crept along his spine and settled, like a block of lead, in his stomach.

The cat-man craned his neck forward suddenly to stare at Myde again before stepping back, tilting his head from side to side in an occupied way. "Why is the sea," he purred, "boiling hot?"

_Why is the sea boiling hot? _Myde got a sudden, inexplicable notion that something important, some terrible riddle and secret had just been uttered—and he was completely without an answer.

"Why is what?" was all the intern could think to say.

Chester turned away from his guests in a dancing sweep, spinning his bright-topped head to reply over his shoulder. "Why is what what?" The cat-man's mouth seemed only to make two expressions: a wide and curious 'O', and that peculiar crescent moon smile.

"Why is the sea boiling hot?" Myde repeated, though Aerith was shaking her head as if to tell him not to try.

"Whoever asked a silly thing like that?" The yellow-eyed man looked genuinely interested.

"You did!" Myde insisted, trying to reign in the first tendrils of frustration. "Just now."

"Did I?" Blinking his wide eyes once, the purple-haired man tapped idly with a finger on the bowl-curve of his own grin. "Well, I _would_ say something as mad as that."

Myde remembered Aerith's repeated assertions to Ariel that she wasn't crazy, and realized that doing a good job meant he shouldn't let Chester get away with insulting himself either.

"Don't say that—you're not crazy!" Myde mustered what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

"Of course I am." Chester slunk across the room to perch easily on one of the two windowsills. "It can't be helped. We're all mad here." He brushed his cheek with the back of one hand, like a cat washing its face. "I'm mad," he added, "you're mad…"

"What makes you say that?" the intern replied. There was hardly any defensive edge in his voice, and for that, Myde was glad.

"Well you must be mad," said the cat-man, "or you wouldn't have come _here_."

Aerith sighed in the sudden silence. "We have to be going Chester," she said. "We only came to say good morning."

"Is it morning already?" he asked, though he was sitting in a clear and bright puddle of sunshine. Aerith only nodded in reply, giving him a pleasant wave and a quiet farewell before opening the door to leave.

"Well, um…" Myde called hesitantly, "good-bye."

"Oooh," the cat-man suddenly sat up straight, yellow eyes snapping bright and sharp on Myde with startling clarity. "So _that's_ why the sea is boiling hot." A gale of laughter burst through his crescent grin, low, and then louder and unending. It seemed to echo as if from a great depth and rattled hollowly in Myde's chest.

"_That's_ why the sea is boiling hot—it's lingered too long in the _light_!"

The cat-man's laughter chased Myde into the hall, and rang in the blond boy's ears even after the purple door closed with a creak.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Well," Aerith said, jerking his attention from the painted door, "you survived your first meeting with Chester Carroll. He's sent more nurses out in frustrated tears than any of the other patients—" her words fell away into a smile that sparkled in her green eyes. "Well, almost any other patient."

Myde was struck with the sudden disconcerting suspicion that Aerith had been saving the best (_Or is that the worst?_ Myde cringed) for last. He warily eyed the green door just a few feet to their left. Myde was taken utterly by surprise when Aerith waved him on and walked past not only the green-painted room, but the orange and white doors after that.

"I've already visited those rooms," she answered his questioning gaze while leading him past a branching hallway and toward yet another set of elevators. "There's only one patient left, actually."

Wondering why they were headed somewhere else if Aerith's patients were supposed to live in this hallway, Myde followed her onto the elevator. There was a moment of silence as they ascended a floor, and Myde tried to sort through his thoughts. Questions battled to be first over his tongue, but most of them were just too rude (_Are they all that creepy?_) or too pathetic (_You mean I have to do this _every_ day?_) to voice. Finally, he settled on something that wouldn't offend her.

"Why are the patients' rooms so… colorful?"

Aerith sent him a bright smile from where she leaned easily against the cool metal wall. "Our patients _live_ here, sometimes for years and years. It's important that they're comfortable. If it doesn't do any lasting damage to the room, we let them decorate however they like.

"Color stimulates the brain and decreases stress. Usually the patients just keep cards or mementoes from home, but some, like Ariel, are dependent on things they've collected." Her next words trailed, slow and a little displeased. "We've actually been taking Ariel's things away one by one because her dependency is unhealthy… Unfortunately, it's gotten to the point where she notices when things are missing."

Myde nodded in reply, but his thoughts were already far away. _People _live_ here_. It wasn't like he hadn't known that, but… He'd just never thought about it. This wasn't a like a hospital stay, where you were a visitor in some sterile room. People lived here; the miniature worlds behind the doors weren't just hospital rooms—they were _bedrooms_.

Something acidic bubbled in his stomach, and Myde shifted from foot to foot to distract himself. Thinking about everything like that just made it all seem wrong. Would he have been able to stand it, being in a place like this, with constant privacy invasions, locks, having his things taken away? Nowhere to go to shut out the rest of the world… Could he live his life according to someone else's schedule? _But you're already doing that!_ a snide voice in the back of his head hissed—it sounded a lot like Yuffie, impersonating his mother.

Something about it just didn't seem right, and for a second, Myde was sure he understood why Aerith had looked so sad. Then the elevator doors chimed and slid open on an eerily familiar hallway.

"Hey, this is where Yen Sid's office is!" The blond blinked in wonder, realizing that their entire trip had been nothing but a massive circle.

"Well actually Yen Sid's office is two hallways over." Aerith took a right down the poorly-lit corridor. "This entire floor is just decorated with the same theme."

_Yeah_, Myde thought, _the _weird_ theme_. He followed after the brunette doctor without saying anything.

"Now…" Aerith's voice was bracing. What she was about to say must have been very important. "I should tell you a little about Ienzo."

_Ienzo._ Hard, cobalt eyes flashed through Myde's mind.

"Especially in this case, we have to respect patient confidentiality laws, but because you're also a hospital liability, it's important that you know the truth and how we handle it."

"The truth?" Something itched along Myde's skin like goose bumps.

"Ienzo is not like our other patients. He was not placed here by concerned family or foster care services." Aerith sighed, and there was something in her green eyes begging his understanding. "Ienzo is here serving an incarceration sentence for attempted manslaughter."

_He tried to kill someone?_ Myde struggled to keep walking though his shock. Some of that distress must have shone through on his face, because Aerith continued talking more rapidly now, attempting to reassure the intern as quickly as possible.

"I know how it sounds, but Ienzo was under a lot of stress at the time, and his delusion had started to take over his life completely. He's not that way anymore." Her green eyes wavered as they watched the navy tile floor pass under their feet. "I trust him," she managed a small smile, "and I hope you will too."

"Uh…" Myde wasn't sure how to politely tell her that he'd rather not trust murderers.

"If it makes you feel better, Ienzo has never tried to hurt anyone else, at all. Though… he can be harsh with his words..." There was a teasing glint to her eyes again when she looked up. "He also happens to have one of the strongest and most complex delusions ever recorded in Rufus Memorial Hospital—which means you'll work with him a lot."

_I'm gonna die_, Myde groaned to himself. Outwardly, he only nodded, not quite trusting his voice.

"I have a feeling you'll like him," Aerith murmured, stopping at last in front of a blank navy door.

_I don't want to disappoint you, but…_ Myde ran a hand through his blond mop of hair, looking anywhere but at Aerith's hopeful face.

Nodding once, as if confirming something to herself, the brunette doctor leant over and slid her clearance card through the door's obtrusive silver lock. A light flashed green and the door's handle jerked a bit as the bolt slid back.

When she didn't make any move to open the door however, Myde toyed with the hem of his scrub awkwardly.

"Well," she giggled, "why don't you go in?" Something about her enthusiasm made him even more wary.

"J-Just me? Ladies first!" Myde flapped a nervous hand toward the door handle.

Aerith crossed her arms and leveled a stare on him. "Tomorrow, you'll have to go in by yourself when _you_ do morning greetings."

"Huh?" A lead weight dropped heavily into Myde's stomach.

"As an intern at Rufus Memorial, you'll have many responsibilities—namely, the responsibilities that everyone else is too busy to handle." Aerith's girlish grin radiated an innocence that Myde had trouble believing. "Don't worry, I'll stand right here and hold the door for you."

Myde weighed the options quickly. He could stay silent and face who knew what type of scary person on the other side of the wall, or he could protest and lose his new job.

"Okay," Myde sighed. Trying to still his shaking hand, the blond reached out, pulled the door open, and walked inside.

Myde's aquamarine eyes dilated quickly to match the darkness of the room. Shadows as thick as blankets coated the bare bones furniture and every empty corner of the room. Dusty, weak light from the window filtered through slatted blinds, scarring the stainless white floor gold. The air in the room was so still and heavy Myde almost choked on it. Nervously, he took a step away from the door.

A low bed cut the room in two; its colorless sheets folded stiffly, like an unused hotel bed. The nightstand beside it, Myde noticed, was bare. Everything in the room was bare; there were no cards, no paintings, no personal items at all. He bumped into the back of an empty teal chair as he took another step.

Three of the pale violet walls were lifeless, flawless plains of a single color; the last wall was not. There were thin, straight strokes of darkness all across it. Squinting through the haze of the room, Myde realized the interrupted black lines were words.

There were words on the wall.

Aquamarine eyes followed the lines automatically toward the floor, catching suddenly on a dash of blue-steel hair and white-cotton-covered shoulders.

A black sharpie marker stilled, resting between a pale hand and the violet wall. Myde took a step farther into the room; the patient did not turn. Instead, he sat deathly still.

Then, in the silence, the blue-haired boy sniffed, slowly, as if to analyze something. The drawl of his breath was animalistic, dark, foreign—yet familiar.

Something in Myde's head pounded.

"It's been a long time," Ienzo's voice was cold as night mist, "Demyx."

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ρŗεłυđε – τ σ – ă – Ń ε ω – Ċσηċεŗŧσ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

1) **Trivia Time! **Ienzo's room (as well as all the colored rooms that Myde saw in this chapter) are a tribute to which 19th century Gothic short story? The order in which Myde sees the colors is significant!

2) As always, crazy amounts of credit go to my wonder beta-reader, **Distorted Gaze**. Well, except for Belle. I take full responsibility for my inability to write her correctly.

3) If you're confused about who some of the characters are (namely Tseng, Kadaj, and Elena) just Wiki Final Fantasy VII. Or even just Advent Children, if you're short on time.

4) Thank you all so much for the reviews! It's so amazing to get so much feedback. That said, I always welcome constructive criticism-especially on Disney characterization, please?-and I love to hear from you guys!

Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alert list.


	4. Wake the Wandering Spirit

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ II_

Ëηŧŗăŧā – Äđāġίσ :

Ŵāκε – τ ħ ė – Ŵāηđεŗίηġ – Şρίŗίŧ

This chapter is dedicated to Ookami Aya and Heiri Sakura.²

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

The smell was brine, salt and sun-kissed water—so completely _Demyx_ that it seemed almost unreal… more unreal than Nobodies already were, anyway. For a moment, Ienzo was tempted to smirk. The irony (and the sheer impossibility of it all) deserved some sort of acknowledgment—but the smile never made it to his lips.

_Demyx._ Yesterday, that name wouldn't have meant anything to him; he would never have been able to match that strange scent to a face. But Demyx was _here_, and one moment was all it had taken for Zexion's memory to become Ienzo's.

Thoughts chased each other in fruitless circles at the back of Ienzo's mind, all "how" and "why" and every manner of scientific theory. None of it seemed to make any difference—solid fact echoed in his head like ever-growing ripples in a disturbed pond.

Statistically, it was almost impossible that they would be meeting in this place. Statistically, Demyx should not have been here.

_But he is here_, some slow, quiet voice whispered in Ienzo's ear. His blond ex-comrade (really a stranger now) took another step into the room, as hesitant as ever. And just like the air in the room began to change, Ienzo knew thousands of more important things were changing.

His reasons for being here, his willingness to languish, all the theories he had accepted about rebirth… Ienzo's fingers itched to rewrite them all immediately, to make for another chapter in his story. But beyond that, behind that, there was a subtle, silent part of himself shifting too.

He could not mistake the scent; there was another Nobody in Dawn City. Another Nobody. Not a dream.

Radiant Garden… Organization XIII… Kingdom Hearts… _Memory_, not delusion.

Even as he ignored it, in the void where Ienzo's heart was supposed to be, a shadow of relief began to stir.

"It's been a long time, Demyx."

For a moment there was utter silence. It was the feeling of walking on glass panes, or standing all alone, frozen still on a winter night.

_Rising Falls… Lanterns… The snow keeps dancing…_

The black words on the wall faded from focus as Ienzo watched them; the lines split in two and crawled over each other like sightless worms.

"M-Myde," the intern choked, shattering the glass silence.

_A thousand glimmering shards in the air… _

"My name is M-Myde." It sounded more like a question than anything else.

A cold-burning sort of interest made Ienzo turn at last, cobalt eyes settling on the boy who was Demyx… but was not. Dusty golden light stained Demyx's—Myde's—already tan skin shadowy and dark, and the dimness of the room made the boy's aquamarine eyes seem overly bright. They were, perhaps, not as blue as Zexion remembered.

"I see… So your memory hasn't returned," Ienzo muttered, climbing stiffly to his feet at last, trailing one hand over the black-stained violet wall.

The blond tensed like a startled rabbit. "My… memory?" He took a half-step back. "Um… I don't… know what you're talking about, but I—"

"Do the words Organization XIII mean anything to you?"

The boy froze, too-green eyes wide in what could have been surprise. "N-No," he stuttered at last, but—Ienzo's own cobalt eyes narrowed in interest—Myde lifted a hand and pressed hard against his temple, as if something there was threatening to beat its way free.

The blond straightened slowly, dropping his hand back to his side. The furrow in his brow looked more like pain than confusion.

"Ummm… Maybe you've got me mixed-up with someone else?" Myde's speech was halting, unsure. "I just… came to say good morning... because I'm the new intern!" he hastily added.

"I know who you are," Ienzo replied. _And I know who you were. _If he had been able to relish anything, Ienzo would have enjoyed the uncertainty and doubt running rampant on Myde's face. "But who you are _now_ isn't important. I'm far more concerned with—"

"Myde?" Aerith's pleasant face peeked around the door. "We need to get going."

"R-Right!" the intern nodded back to her. He turned again to sweep Ienzo over with a nervous eye. "So… er… I'll see you around."

"Certainly." The smile came to Ienzo's lips at last, though it came dark and almost mocking. Myde tried to smile in return; the pitiful attempt wavered and very nearly fell away.

"Gotta go," the blond boy mumbled and, all too eagerly, he spun around and hurried toward the door in a half-scuttle, half-run. _Is he _trying_ to hide how badly he wants out of this room?_

"Demyx," Ienzo called. The reaction was instantaneous—the blond boy jerked to a halt, jumping nervously, as Number Nine had always done.

Myde did not answer, but he did not walk away either.

"Have you at least remembered my name?" Ienzo's voice was dead, too sharp and echo-like in the almost empty room.

"Your name…" The line of the blond's shoulders drew taut; his entire body was trapped in mock rigor mortis. He had not turned to look back. For a long moment, Myde said nothing, and then at last, he murmured, hesitantly, "Ienzo. Your name is Ienzo."

Two steps carried the boy who was and was not Demyx into the hallway, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Ienzo watched shadows walk away from the crack of light under his door.

_If his memories are sleeping, I will just have to wake them._

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The clicking of Aerith's heels on the tile was overly loud: a piercing metronome joining the pounding of Myde's brain against his skull.

Click. Click._ …mean anything to you… Organization XIII…_Click.

_Would you like to know your purpose… Demyx?_

"Myde?" Click.

_You possess great strength, and yet are lacking. A heart… Seek your heart alongside us._

_But I…_ Click.

_Welcome to the Organization, Number Nine._

"Myde?"

_Have you at least remembered my name?_

_Of course I have. Your name is… _

Click. Click.

_Zexion._

"Myde!" Aerith's hand on his arm ripped him brutally from the world in his head, and Myde had to resist the sudden urge to throw her off, to fight… "Are you all right?"

"F-Fine," he rubbed at the back of his head sheepishly. "I just lost myself for a second there." His fingers brushed the bump he'd gained in the locker room that morning, and the blond couldn't keep from wincing.

"I asked how it went with Ienzo." Aerith smiled, but her green eyes were searching him deeply.

"He… made my head hurt."

Aerith's sudden laughter was bright, pure, and infectious, and for a moment, Myde forgot completely about the strange words boiling in the back of his head.

"Don't worry," she said through her giggles, "he does that to all of us."

At her words, the light feeling evaporated, replaced by that unsettling sort of confusion, sinking its claws into the bottom of his stomach. Myde was fairly certain that what had just happened did _not_ happen to everyone.

He slowed their steady walk down the hall to look back at the navy door. There had been such a _sure_ look in Ienzo's cobalt eyes… some sort of sincerity whispering about in the shadows of the empty room.

Empty… The room was so empty, like Ienzo's voice had been, like Myde had been when…

"Doctor Gainsborough," Myde asked suddenly, "how long has… Ienzo been in this hospital?"

All traces of Aerith's lingering smile slipped away.

"Almost," she sighed, "ten years."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Come on," Aerith said, regaining a bit of her cheer. "The first set of sessions is supposed to start in ten minutes, and it's a long walk to my office…"

Myde liked Aerith's office the instant he set foot in it. The room radiated a soft sort of warmth that seemed just right for the brunette woman. Pastel flowers were nestled in every corner, filling the air with a heavy, sweet smell. Old leather-back books, scattered around the flower pots, added to the room's antique, homely feel.

"Oh hang on, I'll get you a chair," Aerith said, disappearing back into the hallway. Myde shifted his weight idly from foot to foot, marveling for a moment at the springiness of the pale salmon rug stretching across the office floor.

Aerith came breezing into the room a moment later, pushing a cracked leather swivel chair before her. The chair caught on the rug, and Aerith stumbled a little in surprise before redoubling her efforts and getting the seat's wheels up and over the thick fabric. Pushing it to another office chair behind the desk, Aerith dropped into her own seat with a quiet exhalation. Myde thought it might have been a happy sigh, but he had never been good at reading people.

As he settled next to the brunette doctor, she unlocked her largest desk drawer and pulled out a thin stack of manila folders.

"This is the patient information for today's morning sessions," Aerith explained. "You probably won't be able to sit in with me every morning, so pay attention when you do. If you're hoping to be a psychological therapist, these one-on-one sessions will be the most valuable experience you get from your internship here."

"And these—" she reached into the desk drawer again, pulling out several complicated looking forms this time, "—are the 'consent to be observed' forms. Patient confidentiality is law, and you could get into a lot of trouble if we violated it."

Myde felt what might have been a nervous tic developing under his right eye.

"So we just ask the patients if they are willing to be observed during their sessions—" Aerith said, suddenly turning to look up at an old-fashioned wrought-iron clock on the wall behind them, "—which should have started two minutes ago."

As if on cue, there was a polite rap on the doorframe of Aerith's office, before a red-headed girl with indigo eyes peeked into the room.

"Am I late?" The girl's grin was only a little sheepish.

"It's okay," Aerith smiled and then leant to pull one manila folder off the stack.

With an ease that implied familiarity, the red-headed girl flopped on to the only other seat in the room: a cushy pale salmon _thing_ that looked (to Myde at least) like an odd mixture of miniature couch and rocking chair. Her curious indigo eyes surveyed him in the same way he was watching her. The red-head was tiny, utterly dwarfed by the seat that would have barely fit an adult, but the smile on her face had a mischievous edge and a glint of some hidden knowledge, as if she had a secret she was dying tell.

She was maybe eleven, and a sudden tinge of almost-sadness caught in Myde's throat. It was one thing to see adults in Rufus Memorial Hospital—it was another to see children like Kadaj or this little girl.

"Kairi, this is Myde Cistern. Myde, this is Kairi." Aerith leaned back in her chair in a way that seemed too professional. Myde could almost hear her murmuring _and how does that make you feel?_ "Would you mind if he observed us today?"

"Nah, that's fine," Kairi nodded lightly; the smile never once left her face.

"Good," the brunette doctor said, leaning over her desk to offer Kairi the consent form and a pen. "You've done one of these before, haven't you? Just print your name at the top and sign at the bottom." Once the red-head had followed her instructions, Aerith passed the form over to Myde. It looked like a jumble of tiny print and legal jargon, and he barely got through the first sentence before giving up on reading it. With more flourish than he was feeling, Myde jotted his name in the two blank spaces left over.

A niggling sense of anxiety flared in the back of his head. He'd probably already broken half the terms on this paper by—unwillingly!—letting his friends see that patient information packet… Choking down a nervous giggle, Myde handed the paper back to Aerith, choosing to stare at his own hand rather than look her in the face.

"All right," Aerith smiled, straightening in her seat again. "Kairi, if you feel uncomfortable, just say so, and we'll talk about something else."

"Mmkay," the girl nodded in an almost disinterested way, as if she was sure nothing could make her uncomfortable.

"Kairi has a disorder called Catatonic Schizophrenia," Aerith said, speaking to Myde now. "Schizophrenia is not really… like you see in movies. Kairi's primary symptom is her capability to hear auditory hallucinations—the _voices_ of a select group of people. The most common of her hallucinations is the voice of a boy… named Sora."

As if the name itself was some type of magic, Kairi suddenly shifted in her seat, indigo eyes glittering with a new vigor.

"And Sora," Aerith continued, "is exactly what I want to talk about today. Kairi, would you explain a little bit about… him, so that Myde will be able to follow us?"

"Well, it's kinda a long story," the red-head mused, but it was clear she was eager to tell it. "You see…"

"Once upon a time," she started, "there was a boy named Sora, who lived in a beautiful world called Destiny Islands, with his two friends: a boy named Riku… and a girl named Kairi.

"Even though their world seemed perfect... there was darkness in it too. Riku got lost in the darkness, and the rest of the world was lost with him."

Kairi's voice then was not her own—her own, but… Myde couldn't explain except the girl telling the story sounded older than Kairi, softer, wiser, paler… the white of empty eggshells.

_…And suddenly all the world is the grain on a sheet of paper and lines of waxy residue in seven faded colors…_

_Naminé_, his mind said, _Naminé_. The word meant _nothing_ and _something_ to him in a hundred different ways.

Kairi—_Naminé—_continued her story, deaf to Myde's thoughts.

"…but there was a great strength in Sora's heart, and he turned that strength into a weapon. He lost his home and his friends… but he made new companions, and journeyed for a long time to restore light to not only his own world, but to many other worlds as well. Most of the time Kairi wasn't with him… and Riku stood against him, but…"

There was a softer smile on her face now, tinged with sincerity and care.

"At last, he was able to put everything back the way it was… his world… his friends. Sora was… a hero. And even after he'd found his own light, he continued to be a hero. He gave his whole life to helping others.

"But that was a very long time ago, and _that_ Sora… that Riku… that Kairi… they aren't alive anymore."

The stunning clarity that she spoke with, no condemnation or hesitance, pressed in the back of his mind. Memory flitted just along the border of consciousness and Myde was aware there was something he should know; something showed through in the quiet, serene shine to her indigo—pale blue?—eyes.

"I used to dream about all three of them," the small girl said. "All their adventures… I thought I would give anything to be _that_ Kairi… to be there with them. Sometimes I imagined that I wasn't dreaming—that they were really memories from another life, chained together in my heart."

Her indigo eyes had settled on her own lap, and her slender hands laid there, smoothing invisible wrinkles in her skirt as if they were used to holding something that she did not have with her.

"And then… I heard his voice—a new Sora's—in my head. He didn't know me… he didn't know anyone named Kairi. But he said 'we must be connected some way, because when I talk to you, I feel like I've come home or… heh!' Yeah, he said that, in the same silly voice as always." She laughed, a sudden flash of longing and distance pooling in her eyes.

"He tells me everything about his life. He has the same brown hair and blue eyes… he lives in the world of Destiny Islands… his best friends are a silver-haired boy named Riku and a red-head named—"

Whatever word she was going to say died in her mouth, and her entire body went slack in a single fluid motion. Her eyelids, rimmed with heavy black lashes, fell to half-open; her stare became vacant.

"Kairi!" Aerith called sharply, but the sound had less fear in it than Myde expected.

"What's wrong with her?" His aquamarine eyes darted between the slumped red-head and Aerith, who had not made a move to stand.

"She's slipped into a catatonic state. Even though her medication is supposed to stop this, it keeps happening. None of us are sure why." Aerith sighed softly, standing at last and crossing to the couch to settle Kairi in a more comfortable position. The girl was malleable under her hands, and, like an unstrung marionette, seemed to lie simply lifeless.

"Shouldn't we try to wake her up?" Myde stumbled, unsure of what to make of it all.

"No. Waking her up now will do more harm than good. The catatonic state doesn't hurt her body…"

A sudden lance of intuition pierced Myde's skull like a pin coming down into a specimen. "What about… her mind? Is it hurting that?"

"…No. We haven't noticed any lingering effects from the catatonic episodes—though they do coincide with her auditory hallucinations. She slips into a state like this and wakes up claiming she's been speaking with Sora. It's not good to have a disorder, in any case, but… Kairi enjoys her hallucinations."

"That's not normal, is it?" Myde didn't want to stare, but it was hard to look away from the limp doll Kairi had become.

Aerith moved to check the girl's pulse with gentle hands. "No, it's not normal," she said at last, "but nothing about Kairi is normal." Aerith's green eyes slid to the consent form sitting on her desk, white paper stark against mahogany wood. "Kairi is a ward of the government. They found her wandering the streets of the city several years ago. She had no memory of her home, her parents… nothing. No one came forward to claim her as their child, and so she was placed here, to get treatment for amnesia.

"But Kairi never had amnesia—at least, not in the sense that amnesiacs usually do. Typically, amnesia is caused by self-repressed memories, or severe brain trauma. To the best of our knowledge, Kairi has suffered neither."

"Then where are her memories?" Something tightened in Myde's throat, and he regretted the question the moment it left his mouth.

"We're still trying to find that out." Aerith's voice was almost inaudible. "But," she continued, "Kairi's lost memory is not the strangest thing about her case."

Myde couldn't think of anything more troubling than disappearing memories, but Aerith hadn't made a false statement yet. "Then what _is_ the strangest thing?" the blond asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted an answer.

"Sora," Aerith murmured. "Kairi has created such a strong picture of Sora that—if I hadn't known the truth—even I would believe that he was real. She's invented a name for his school, addresses, how tall he is, a pout for his voice, the names of his parents, his friends' parents… his favorite foods and hundreds of different places that he supposedly has been... Very few if any of the details contradict."

"That's not that strange though… In my neuropsychology class my professor was talking about delusions that sometimes make more sense than real-life situations, and delusions that last like… forever."

"That's true. But it's not just the details of Kairi's hallucinations—it's the way those details relate to some of the other patients' delusions."

"To the… other patients?"

"Most of the doctors here have nicknamed it the _Sora Syndrome_." Aerith smiled in spite of herself and made her way back to her seat behind the desk. "Many of the patients in this ward have some sort of affinity for 'Sora'. It's usually almost unnoticeable—they'll say the name and then look confused, like they've never heard the word before." She shuffled a few of the manila folders idly in her hands.

"Even Ienzo's delusion has a Sora." Her green eyes met and locked with his, and for a long moment Aerith did not even blink.

"You mean all the patients have the same hallucination?" Myde turned to stare at Kairi again, more in evaluation than morbid curiosity now.

"Doctor Yen Sid has been studying the _Sora Syndrome_ for quite a while now. He decided that it's probably a _folie à plusieurs_—a transmitted delusion. He suggested that some part of Kairi's story must have appealed to the other patients, and without even knowing it, they started picking up pieces of her hallucinations and making those pieces their own." Aerith's voice had a undercurrent to it that Myde had never heard there before, a hesitant, almost suspicious edge. She had moved her gaze to Kairi when he had, but now as Myde turned to watch her, Aerith's green eyes were narrowed in thought.

"Is that… what you think is going on?" Myde wondered if he was being nosy, but Aerith didn't brush him off either way.

"I don't really know. I don't think that Ienzo is the type to start believing in someone else's delusion."

Though he hardly knew the strange blue-haired boy locked away on the top floor, something made Myde silently agree.

"It's almost a mystery. And as doctors, we do have a responsibility to find the causes of our patients' delusions…" the brunette sighed. "But… I'm not sure if _curing_ Kairi would be the best for her. The times she's happiest are when she's heard Sora in her mind. Sora isn't hurting any of the patients… he may even be helping." The thoughtful look had not left her face, though it was softer now.

"I don't know if I really want Sora gone," Aerith said.

_She talks about him like he was a real person_, Myde thought. _Does she even know she's doing that? _

A heavy sort of silence settled over the room, and the blond intern had no idea how to fill it.

After what seemed like a period of agonizing quiet—it was probably only a few minutes; Myde never was very patient—Kairi began to stir.

She sat up just as quickly as she had slumped, and where her eyes had been vacant then, they were now crinkled with happiness. A quiet giggle escaped her, as if someone had just told a cute joke.

"That was Sora," she grinned over at Myde and Aerith. "I tried to tell him I couldn't talk, but he wanted to know why, and as soon as I said I was talking about him, he _had_ to know exactly what we were saying. Heh," Kairi giggled again. "Sora's pretty hard to get rid of when he wants to know something."

"Sora…" The sound of Kairi's voice changed almost faster than Myde could follow, and once more, a quiet, thoughtful look swept onto her face. It was as if her story had never been interrupted. "That new Sora, the Sora who talks to me… He's not the hero I dreamed about. Well he is, but he isn't…" She stumbled a bit; her eyebrows drew close and something like a pout puffed out her cheeks.

"It's hard to explain." Kairi brushed a strand of red-hair out of her eyes after she spoke. "I know that he's not the same Sora… but that's okay. I'm not the same Kairi."

"Thank you," Aerith smiled at the smaller girl. Then she turned in her seat to look at the clock on the wall and shook her head. "The hour is almost over. We might as well stop—" a sparkling laugh "—before we even really start."

"Okay," Kairi nodded: a sharp, happy nod, as if she were the one making the decision. Easily, the red-head stood from the pale salmon chair (couch-thing, Myde still wasn't sure _what_ it was) and clasped her hands behind her back.

"Bye Aerith! Bye—" she paused for the barest of seconds, "—Myde!" And with that same pleased grin on her face, Kairi vanished into the hall again.

_Myde. Demyx. _

Aerith looked over at him curiously, while her hands shuffled through the manila folders again. "This is turning into a pretty tiring first day, isn't it Myde?"

He never heard her.

_Demyx. Have you at least remembered… lost to the darkness… Sora._

He was on his feet but didn't remember standing.

_Other worlds… have you… remembered? _

"Ummm… Doctor Gainsborough, I think I… I'm just going to go ask Kairi something really quick." Myde stumbled through the words as his aquarmarine eyes tried to stare around the doorframe and down the hall.

"For your thesis research?"

"Y-Yeah." The lie came a little too easily to him.

"She's probably heading to the rec. room… It's down the hall on the left," Aerith offered. Myde only nodded in returned; it was all he could do to keep from running after the red-headed girl.

_Sora. Other worlds. …remember…_

_Because of the strength of your heart._

"Kairi!" He jogged to catch up with her, stopping the girl just as she was about to enter the crowded recreational room. "I was wondering…"

"Hm?" Indigo eyes blinked up at him.

"You said… about the other worlds… I mean… The other Kairi lived on Destiny Islands right? And Sora is still there… and you're connected to him, but you're here…"

Her face shifted into the barest of confused frowns. "What are you asking?"

"If you were on Destiny Islands and they're still there—er…" Sudden, unexpected embarrassment swept over him, and Myde almost turned around and walked away. She probably had no idea why he wanted to know and it was so out of the blue and… _she's gonna think I'm going crazy_.

"I just…" he mumbled, "If all that stuff about the other… lives and the other worlds is… true… Why aren't you where Kairi was before? I mean… do you think there's a reason you're _here_?"

"Well," the red-head blinked slowly again, "the original Kairi wasn't from Destiny Islands either. It turned out that she was from a place called Radiant Garden—or maybe," she mused, "they're still calling it Hollow Bastion?"

He stopped breathing.

_There's going to be a lump there the size of Hollow Bastion…_

Hollow Bastion.

_I _am_ going crazy_.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Too much spite Yazoo, not enough cynicism," Ienzo muttered as he slid into his seat the cafeteria table.

"I suppose you _would_ know," the silver-haired boy's voice was a disinterested drawl; he took a spot next to Ienzo.

"Better… though your sense of subtly is still underdeveloped." Brushing blue-steel strands of hair out of his face, Ienzo sniffed suspiciously at the steaming lunch in front of him. After a long, cursory stare, the meal seemed to pass some unspoken test, because, without further hesitation, Ienzo sipped at a spoonful of hot soup. "There is a certain… power in letting your opponents draw their own conclusions from your come-backs," the blue-haired boy continued.

"Loz is too stupid draw conclusions." Yazoo looked only vaguely annoyed when he said it.

The sudden sound of heavy, clomping footsteps hit their ears as Yazoo's stocky younger brother, Loz, stomped over to them. "I am not stupid!"

Yazoo leaned back in his chair sedately, an evaluating acid-green stare sweeping over Loz. "Of course you're not stupid." But Yazoo had a particular glint in his eye that belied his words, and Ienzo was not the only one to notice it.

The shorter-haired brother's hands curled into fists. For a moment it looked like Loz would shout, or tell his older sibling off, but instead he sighed heavily and muttered, "Brother wants to talk."

The two silver-haired boys shared a meaningful look before Yazoo broke it off and slid easily from the cafeteria bench. With a nod as his only good-bye, Yazoo picked up his lunch tray and slithered down the row between the tables. The silver-haired boys vanished almost instantly in the flurry of hungry children and rushing adults.

_Well_, Ienzo thought, _there went my only chance at intelligent lunch conversation_. For a twelve-year-old, Yazoo was incredibly self-possessed. The boy's razor-sharp wit and tendency toward taunting sarcasm made him far more interesting to talk to than most of the other patients… which also made him one of the few people in Rufus Memorial Hospital that Ienzo could stand. Yazoo was an interesting case, Ienzo had once discussed with Aerith. Where his younger brothers had become hypersensitive to emotions after their mother's death, Yazoo seemed to be disenchanted with feeling on the whole.

That was a state Ienzo could more than understand.

Dismissing the thoughts and contenting himself with the rather mediocre lunch (Marlene had apparently had the day off), Ienzo would have gone the entire hour ignoring the troubled people around him—except, at that exact moment, Aerith came through the distant cafeteria doors, Demyx trudging behind her.

Too-green eyes, barely open, surveyed the room for a moment, catching on squabbling groups of children and equally noisy adult patients. Myde's aqua gaze met Ienzo's cobalt eyes for a fraction of a second before the blond intern jerked his head around, desperately starting up some weak conversation with Aerith. When the brunette woman gave a polite wave to the ever-present Tseng, Ienzo noticed Myde leaping to cower behind the pink-swath woman. Demyx shot the dark-haired security guard a look of abject terror—a familiar look and not surprising in the slightest, given the parties involved… _Though_, the blue-haired boy mused, _that has to be the fastest Tseng has ever managed to utterly intimidate someone_.

Aerith said something Ienzo couldn't hear and patted Myde comfortingly on the back. Rather than looking relieved, the intern paled another degree. His aquamarine eyes darted over the room again, and Myde winced when he realized Ienzo was still watching. Waving her hand in a gentle, sweeping motion, Aerith gestured to the busy cafeteria before them. Whatever she had been telling Myde, she seemed finished, and the blond nodded reluctantly.

The lunch in front of him was going cold rather rapidly, but Ienzo had stopped paying attention to that ages ago. A callous cobalt gaze followed as Myde wove his way into the groups of patients. The blond stopped every few feet to speak to the least intimidating people near him. He was still not close enough for his words to be audible, but Ienzo could fill in the vibrant silence with memories of Demyx's bouncy, awkward voice.

It became almost blatantly obvious—in a matter of moments—that Myde had every intention of ignoring Ienzo. After the first furative glances, the blond had hovered on the opposite side of the cafeteria, taking pains to keep as far away from the blue-haired patient as possible.

If Ienzo had had a heart, he might have felt insulted—as it stood, he was plagued only by a type of frustration, one that clenched his teeth completely of its own accord. What was most trying about the entire thing, Ienzo thought, was that he had no idea _why_ the shadow of frustration was pushing at him.

It wasn't as if being ignored particularly irked him (he'd grown more than used to it, living in Rufus Memorial), or that he had something pressing to say to Demyx. Actually, the longer he thought on it, the more improbable it seemed—and the more troublesome the situation became. Ienzo had not been expecting another Nobody, had not prepared himself at all for that statistical near-impossibility… What would he do with Demyx if he did manage to awaken the Nobody? It wasn't as if they could simply go back to being Six and Nine, sharing the common ikon Kingdom Hearts.

A quiet voice in the back of Ienzo's mind asked if it was _right_ to force Myde's memory, if he _should_ turn the non-confrontational musician back into a heartless—Ienzo cut the thought off there with remarkable ease. "Should" and "should not" hadn't meant anything to him in more than a decade.

_It doesn't matter_, the blue-haired boy decided suddenly. Demyx was here; there was absolutely no reason Ienzo should suffer nothingness alone.

The quiet little part of him warned against manipulation, the subjective nature of personalities, the sheer impossibility of Ienzo "suffering", the chance things could go wrong… That lingering doubt was difficult to shake, as hard as the memories it brought with it.

_…helplessness and that sudden agony and too-green eyes in…_

Demyx, Ienzo reminded himself, was not Axel.

And, as simply as that, Ienzo determined that Myde was not allowed to ignore him. As soon as he had reached that decision, the blue-haired boy was already analyzing options, throwing out scenarios and discarding them as quickly as they came. He could not simply walk up to the blond boy and demand an audience—Myde was clearly the type to retreat when threatened. And waiting for the tide of people in the cafeteria to shift so that the intern _had_ to come closer was utterly impractical. The only course of action, Ienzo concluded, would be to manipulate Myde into approaching (seemingly) of his own volition.

Ienzo would have thought _easier said than done_, except that for him, it was as easily done as said. A cobalt eye swept over the seat Yazoo had abandoned, and then down the tables, setting pieces in a line in his head. He would only need—there. Chester Carroll was two rows over, infuriating some girl or another. And… there was Nurse Bagheera Kipling, being thoroughly ignored as he tried to break up an overly loud group of patients. Ienzo would have to work quickly…

It was exceptionally easy to catch Chester Carroll's attention (and harder to keep it, but Ienzo didn't need to hold it for long). A wave of his was all it took to bring Chester slinking over, as curious as ever.

"Cheshire Cat," Ienzo smiled with more cajolement than he felt, "would you do me a favor, please?"

The cat man looked positively delighted—though his type of delight might as well have been malice. "Why certainly…" The yellow-eyed man grinned. "Is it an _important_ favor?"

"Not at all," Ienzo offered immediately. He had played this game enough times to know the rules.

For a moment, the cat man seemed a little disappointed, but the look slunk off his face like a caterpillar wriggling off a leaf. "I suppose I'll have to do it right then," Chester said, in a tone that betrayed the fact that he knew Ienzo was lying.

"You see the new intern other there?" Ienzo made a vague wave toward Myde.

Chester chortled. "His sleeve's missing a heart, you know."

"I need him to go in _that_ direction." With a somber and unhesitant face, Ienzo pointed the polar opposite way, exactly where he did _not_ want Myde to go.

"Does it really matter which way he goes?" Chester's overly-luminous eyes stared, unblinking, at Ienzo. "He's already lost."

A flash of moon-white grin was all the cat man left behind as he flounced off to stir up mischief.

Turning his attention for the barest of moments, Ienzo ascertained that Bagheera was not going to be slinking off any time soon. The lithe, dark-skinned nurse was currently trying to evade more than a few wildly swinging limbs and the painfully loud voices of those patients in the crowd who were incapable of volume control.

Shifting his gaze back to Chester threatened to amuse Ienzo. The cat man had managed to corner Myde at the end of a row of tables (how that was logistically possible, Ienzo didn't stop to wonder). Chester crept closer and closer to the intern by the second; Myde looked absolutely terrified and in desperate need of personal space.

Then the blond took a step back. And another. Ienzo resisted the temptation to gloat mentally. Just as he had expected, Chester was doing the exact opposite of what he had been asked. Rather than sending Myde in the direction Ienzo had pointed, the cat man was coralling the poor intern right toward aggravated Nurse Bagheera. (Whether Chester had done the opposite on purpose, just to be contrary, or whether he had known what Ienzo really wanted, and was playing along, the blue-haired boy wasn't sure—the Cheshire Cat's motivations were simply too erratic to be understood.)

Myde shuffled backward as Chester advanced. What the yellow-eyed man was saying, Ienzo couldn't hear, but judging from the intern's expression it was either completely mad—or worse, completely sane. Myde's side caught on the edge of a table, and he tripped backward even quicker than before. It looked like he wanted to turn tail and run away as fast as possible, but couldn't break eye contact for fear of being pounced.

And then—Myde slammed into Bagheera, dropping a heavy foot on the nurse's toes.

"RAHHH!" Bagheera's shout sounded more like a leopard's scream than anything else, and Myde leapt away out of sheer shock. Unfortunately, this landed the intern directly in the middle of the group of mentally-challenged patients, who, excited by the stranger, all made moves to touch him at the same time.

Wide-eyed and panting, Myde cowered his way free of the crowd, stumbled down the row of tables, and collapsed into the nearest free seat—next to Ienzo. He dropped his shaggy blond head, with a loud _thunk_, onto the table.

The blue-haired boy suddenly caught himself wishing Lexaeus were still around; that maneuver had been absolutely praise-worthy.

"Hello Myde," Ienzo said.

"UWAHH!"

Myde tried to jump up out of the seat, but his scrub caught on something under the table and whiplashed him back into place. "Eh hee," the blond laughed, fumbling under the table to free himself.

"You're as tactful as ever," Ienzo sighed. After surveying his fingers, as if trying to find patterns among the black ink smudges, Ienzo's cobalt eyes darted up to catch Myde's face—his face, not his gaze, which was looking desperately away, pupils flittering in the corners of his eyes.

Discomfort rolled off the blond in almost palpable waves. He tapped his fingers on the table nervously. "This cafeteria's really nice!" Myde burst suddenly, voice bouncing between timidity and an attempt to be distracting.

Ienzo was not to be deterred. "I prefer the kitchen in the Castle that—"

The blond leapt halfway out of his seat again, fidgeting like common courtesy was the only thing stopping him from running off right then and there.

"That's…great!" Myde bumbled, straining to fill the sudden silence. Ienzo could see sweat forming on the blond's temple. Suddenly, Myde _did_ clamber out of the chair. "Umm… I think I'm just gonna…"

Apparently common courtesy had a time limit.

"I'm just gonna—"

"Myde? Ienzo?" Aerith's sudden call was bright and surprised. She slid through a gap in the tables a row over and hurried to stand in front of them. "How nice that you're becoming friends."

"Friends?" Ienzo blinked.

"Becoming…" It was a whispered echo, so distant and thoughtful that Ienzo had trouble believing it came from Demyx. "Becoming…" Myde muttered again, and it had nothing to do with what Aerith had said. It had nothing to do with anything in that expansive cafeteria, Rufus Memorial, or the world beyond that…

The look on Ienzo's face was, perhaps, a little too smug.

"I just came over to see if you wanted to tour the kitchens," Aerith said to Myde. "We should probably go over fire evacuation procedure."

Myde leapt—quite literally—at the chance, and relief ran rampant beneath his weak smile. "Y-Yeah! Right away!" For a moment Aerith's green eyes darted between Myde and Ienzo, and she seemed torn between confusion and concern at Myde's willingness to leave.

At last, awkward silence made up her mind for her, and Aerith waved a cautious good-bye to Ienzo. Her steps were marked with only a little hesitance.

As Myde made a move to follow her, the blond finally met Ienzo's gaze.

There was a raw, unadulterated shock in it—the stabbing, tingling of stepping into icy water, the relentess pull of a tide, a flash of… One eye saw Dawn City; one eye saw…

_…things waiting now to pounce and…_

_…the sea._

Familiarity like bile burned the back of Ienzo's throat and the hollow place inside him echoed: voices through an endless tunnel, wind rushing to fill a void.

It felt like drowning—in darkness, in nothingness, in _Zexion_.

The blond intern hissed suddenly in pain, clutching his head. He took a nervous step away from Ienzo.

"Dem—" the blue-haired boy started.

Myde was already gone, running after Aerith in a dead sprint.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

A yawn, so heavy it rang in Myde's ears, pulled his mouth into a vacant 'O'. For a moment he was tempted to stifle the yawn—or at the very least lift a hand to cover his mouth—but his hand felt like it weighed half a ton, and the added effort seemed insurmountable. His hand was content staying right where it was: resting on top of his overflowing messenger bag. The ragged hem of one jean leg flapped as he trudged. Even stumbling suddenly, as his shoe caught in a sidewalk crack, wasn't enough to awaken the intern, and he slouched through the parking lot of Rufus Memorial Hospital more than half asleep.

Myde was nearly crawling by the time he reached _Flounder_, and only sheer force of will gave him the strength to kick the engine to a start when it coughed weakly.

In his state of unfailing fatigue, the blond intern made one critical mistake: while puttering out of the parking lot, he forgot to watch for ambulances.

"HOLY CRA—" The rest of the word was lost under the screeching of tires on pavement, as _Flounder_ swerved dangerously sideways to escape the oncoming emergency vehicle. Just as Myde righted himself and the moped, clutching at his chest—where his heart was threatening to pound its way out of his ribs—the ambulance slowed, and the passenger-side windowed rolled down.

"Oy!" shouted a rather obnoxious voice, which belonged to a small, red-headed man, whose face reminded Myde of some kind of rodent. "Watch where yah goin' will yah?"

The muscle under Myde's right eye twitched of its own volition.

"Ah, Timon," the ambulance's driver tried to interject, "dontcha think that was kinda.. our fault too?"

"The nerve of kids these days!" The red-headed man gripped, utterly dismissing his partner's comment. Suddenly he rounded on the larger EMT, waving a wild hand. "What're yah just sittin' here for? Drive Pumbaa, drive!"

"Sorry about that," the portly driver waved to Myde over Timon's head. Then, with one rev of its engine, the ambulance sped off. Rather than pulling up the emergency room entrance, the ambulance headed around back, toward the hospital's garage, leaving Myde and _Flounder_ sputtering in the parking lot exit.

"You know what?" Myde slumped over the moped's handlebars, messy blond hair falling untamed into his eyes. "Today really sucked!"

Streets and skyscrapers flashed past as he motored back through the city. In the golden-red sunset, the glassy buildings looked like blood-stained blocks of obsidian—in the dawn they seemed welcoming; at dusk some sense of foreboding seemed to settle around their towering steel forms. Myde thought of giants and shadows and a thousand monsters bending down to swallow him whole.

Even while cars flooded the streets and people stomped down the sidewalks, briefcases swinging or purses tucked protectively under their arms, the city seemed somehow dead. There was none of the fresh feeling that dawn always brought it; there were food wrappers and plastic cups in the gutters and the air tasted metallic and hot. Everyone on the streets seemed to be talking, but not to each other. Myde counted more cell phones in a single block than a wireless emporium could stock in a month.

No matter which road he took, the faces of the people walking by were haggard and frustrated (or maybe only tired). Petulantly, Myde thought he had them all beat for exhaustion. His first day as an intern in Rufus Memorial Hospital had been grueling—no, beyond grueling. It had been excruciating, mind-numbing, back-breaking, mentally-trying and a plethora of other synonyms for terrible, none of which seemed to sum up just how bad it had actually been.

First there'd been that scary security guard, then Myde had been abused by a whiny silver-haired kid, and then… The blond groaned quietly to himself, replaying each bruise and bump with increasing displeasure. _And _then_, after lunch…_ After lunch had been nearly as bad as before lunch. One of Aerith's patients had asked not to be observed, so Myde had been sent off to help the nurses in the recreation room.

That was about the time Kadaj (and Kadaj's two older brothers), decided to make the blond's life a living hell. By the time the other nurses heard Myde's pleas for help, he had already been decorated with another set of bruises via Kadaj's sparkly shoes, and his pride had taken a serious blow from the other two boys' mocking laughter.

Myde decided, at that moment, that he would never try and stop Kadaj from escaping Rufus Memorial ever again. It just did not pay to get between that boy and his mother.

Leaning into a hard right, his elbow dug into his overstuffed messenger bag to keep it in place, Myde pushed down sharply on _Flounder_'s handle throttle. The little engine shuddered and churned, straining against the force of gravity as Myde steered the moped up a hill. The city's towering buildings had slowly fallen behind him, and the dying sun perched on his back like a bird or a boulder—the whole weight of the world.

While Kadaj's ire had been, by no means, a highlight of Myde's day, the rest of his afternoon had been horrid enough to make it seem like only another stone on the pile. After Kadaj and his brothers had been sent, whining, back to their room, the intern had somehow managed to find himself cornered by three blustery old ladies, who wanted his opinion on which of their dresses was the better color.

Myde had been stumped for a good ten minutes—all three of them were wearing white.

And then there'd been that irritating kid named Pino-something, with his "Jiminy says this.." and "Jiminy says that". It wasn't that Myde didn't like the kid… it was just that he had no clue who "Jiminy" was, or how lying could possibly make your nose grow.

Then he'd gotten stuck pushing a medicine cart, making Aerith tea (he'd spilled boiling water on his hand twice), and playing a seemingly neverending game of pattycake with a patient he was fairly sure was developmentally challenged (but you just don't ask that sort of thing). He'd gotten lost three times, run into Tseng twice more, and Belle had wanted to know everything about his first day when he'd finally come downstairs again.

And on top of that, Myde huffed, there was the blue-haired boy. Ienzo, Zexion… Myde wasn't sure what to call him—but there was something _wrong_ about him. Distant thudding, almost in time with _Flounder_'s engine, started up in Myde's head again. It seemed to happen every time he tried to make sense of the things Ienzo said, tried to grip the fragments of… of what he wasn't sure.

It didn't make sense, any of it, and the more Myde thought about it, the farther away it seemed to slip, like words permanently stuck just on the tip of his tongue. He couldn't remember because he wanted to remember, except he knew there wasn't anything _to_ remember and the things that meant something to him today—Demyx, Demyx, Demyx—really couldn't mean anything at all.

Myde started suddenly, realizing he'd subconsciously brought _Flounder_ to idle outside a set of familiar wrought-iron and gilt gates. The moped's engine hummed dully as the blond reversed toward the security booth.

Mindlessly punching in the entrance code on a shining silver keypad, Myde balanced _Flounder_ with one foot against the ground. The moped's exhaust pipe was hot against his navy-blue scrub pants.

"Welcome," a computerized voice droned as the gates began to open, "to Aurora Heights."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Ienzo?" Aerith's voice ghosted into his room above the muffled click of her heels on the tile. The door locked with a _hiss_ behind her.

Aerith knew something was wrong before she had even taken two more steps into the dim room. The first of the signs was a black sharpie marker, abandoned on the floor. The cap was half off, as if its only user had thought about writing but abandoned the idea. Ienzo was not standing beside any of the walls, reading his work—he was not in the teal chair either.

As motionless as the air in the room, Ienzo was strewn haphazardly across the immaculate white sheets of his bed.

Sunset streaming through the shuttered blinds cut diagonal gold strips into his pale skin and paler clothing. The rise and fall of his side as he breathed bent the dusty lines of light, and for a moment they looked like a part of him, rings of radience and darkness painted on to his body.

"Ienzo?" Aerith called quietly. He didn't answer her.

A small, benevolent smile lit on the brunette's lips as she crossed the room. Ienzo had dropped his shoes and socks somewhere (probably under the bed in an excuriatingly neat little pile, socks folded tidily) and it was almost impossible to stifle a giggle at the sight of his bare feet. They were simply too big for his body—like a young boy who hadn't quite grown into himself yet. It was endearing in the oddest of ways…

Ienzo was half-curled like a crescent moon or a sleeping cat, one arm trapped beneath his head and the other draped lifelessly over the blankets. Steady, slow puffs of his breath caught on blue-steel strands of hair, making them dance like spiderwebs in a breeze.

Feeling motherly and compassionate, Aerith leant to brush the blue locks out of his face.

"Don't touch me please," Ienzo said suddenly, voice as sharp and alert as ever. Half out of surprise and half from something she could and did not want to put a name to, Aerith jerked her hand back, pressing it against her chest.

"I thought you were asleep." She smiled to hide the strange, frightened beating of her heart.

His eyes were slivers of cobalt under dark lashes. "I know."

Aerith retreated for a moment to grab the empty chair. As quietly as possible, she dragged it nearer to the bed, where she could watch Ienzo's vacant face and feel as if they were having a more pleasant conversation.

"You didn't come to our session this afternoon." There was no trace of reproach in her voice, just barely-veiled concern. "Are you feeling well?"

"Feeling?" He traced lines on the starched blankets with a disinterested finger. "No."

"You're not feeling well… or you're not _feeling_?" Aerith clasped and unclasped her hands, rubbing at her wrists in a distracting motion she could not seem to stop.

"Your guess is as educated as mine." Ienzo didn't say anything else. The brunette doctor knew then that she had not been mistaken—something was terribly _off_, a piece of a puzzle forced into the wrong place, a question with no right answer.

Ienzo was never despondent like this. There were times when he threw himself into his writing so deeply that he forgot the real world… but this was some other state entirely. "What are you doing?" she asked, for lack of direction.

"Thinking," answered Ienzo honestly.

"About what?" Aerith leaned forward in her seat, smoothing her pink skirt and wondering if she was going to get a sarcastic reply.

"Myde."

Of all the possible answers, that was certainly not one she had expected, and Aerith sat in stunned silence for a long moment.

"Really?" she managed at last, trying not to sound so surprised. "Because he wants to be your friend?"

"I don't think he does," Ienzo laughed, quiet and dry. And then, in a disconnected musing—as if the two topics were entirely different—he added, "He's interesting, isn't he?" There was a sudden glint in half-lidded cobalt eyes, like he knew much more than he was telling.

"Well, I suppose…" Aerith let her sentence die before it was fully born. Ienzo's eyes still had that curious light, but they were far away, and he wasn't listening to a word she said.

"Ienzo?" She had to call twice more to keep his attention. "Is… something wrong?"

The sun's last rays had crept across the room so slowly that Aerith had not noticed their passage until now—now when they had gone completely from the room. Her eyes had adjusted to the shade, but noticing the darkness seemed to suddenly make it deeper. She longed to stand and turn on the lights, but Ienzo had not answered her and the walls seemed to be bathed in shadows…

"Something wrong?" His eyes were open now, patches of white in the dim. "No, _nothing's_ wrong."

And in the bare second before he was able to turn away from her, Aerith thought she saw the glint of a smile—a true and serene smile—dart across his lips.

Or maybe that was just the darkness playing tricks.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

_Do they make cookie cutters in _house_ shapes?_ Myde wondered as he motored along the perfectly maintained roads, passing perfectly maintained houses. He always thought the same thing when he drove through his gated community—but thinking the same thing made sense, given that nothing there ever changed. If it weren't for the constant passage of day into night, Myde would have sworn that the homes in Aurora Heights were suspended in time, trapped forever at the height of spring: painted with that freshly-cleaned shine and trimmed by trailing briar roses that never stopped blooming.

Because of the strict rules of the gated community, the color and landscaping of each of the houses was exactly the same. Each lawn was neatly mowed and edged (kept up by gardeners, of course); the driveways that weren't empty were filled by shining SUVs and sports cars—not because the people who lived in Aurora Heights were snobbish, but because they could afford nice things.

Myde patted Flounder's handlebar in a consoling manner. "It's okay," the blond laughed, "I know you're better than those gas guzzlers. Beauty is only skin deep!"

It was a sign of how awful his day really had been that Myde was not only talking to his moped, but almost expecting a reply too.

Cresting the final hill of the gated neighborhood at last, Myde steered _Flounder_ into his driveway, staying the mandatory two feet from the side of his mother's newest car: a sleek, silver _Twilight Gale_ convertible.

Myde's mother had actually offered to give him their last car, a _Twilight Gem_ covertible, but he'd turned it down. Yuffie already teased him mercilessly about being a Mama's boy—he didn't need _more_ expensive presents from his mother to confirm Yuffie's opinion. It didn't help either that Myde became quite attached to his things… Every piece of clutter in his room had a name.

And so it was, much to his mother's distaste, that Myde continued to drive _Flounder_, continued to wear his battered sneakers, and toted around a CD player so old it was actually square-shaped.

He would have just left his moped there in the driveway, but while his mother tolerated him owning _Flounder_, she could not tolerate the stares such an "unsightly" machine garnered from their neighbors. So instead of simply hopping off and dragging his battered body inside, Myde was forced to twist his hand awkwardly around to reach for the garage door opener, where it swung on his keyring.

"I'm home…" Myde droned as he slouched through the door connecting the garage and the house. There wasn't any answer, but the sound of distant chattering drew Myde down the hall. The door at the end of the corridor was open, and fluorescent light streamed out of it. Myde leaned on the doorframe and peered into his mother's office. "Mom?"

"Yes, of course Mr. Valiant. Your concerns are of the utmost importance to us. We'll be sure to address them in our next issue. All right. Good-bye."

"Mom?"

Mariana Cistern spun in her office chair, dropping the phone back on its cradle with an agitated sigh. One hand, tipped by well-manicured blue fingernails, raised to sweep long bangs out her eyes; the other hand was already on a computer mouse.

"Mom…" Myde tried again.

The blonde woman jumped in surprise, blinking slowly as if she suspected her son had simply materialized in the room.

"My', honey, how many times has it been now? _Please_ use the front door." Her sage green eyes darted over his scrub surreptiously, and then settled at his feet. "Ah-uh," she tsked, "we know where shoes go, don't we? If you track dirt on the tile, it'll upset the maid."

"Oh." Myde bent to pull off his converse and picked them up off the floor. "Sorry."

"Sit down sweetie," Mariana waved a delicate hand to the folding chair in the corner. A neat stack of papers was piled on top of it, and when Myde made to move them, his mother tsked again. "Don't make a mess of those papers, they're very important to us."

"Us" being, of course, the staff of _Destati_, the prestigious women's magazine his mother edited. There was always some "us" in his mother's conversations, even when she was just speaking to him. Myde was beginning to think she'd had forgotten how to use the word "I".

He was surprised when she came around her desk to take the papers from him, balancing the stack on the top of her PDA, which was—as it always was—strapped to the belt of her casual black pencil skirt.

"Now," she smiled brightly as she dropped back into her leather chair, "let's hear all about the first day." Without waiting for him to speak, however, she started in again. "That scrub looks absolutely at home on you. Didn't everyone say you'd make a wonderful doctor?"

"Yeah…" Myde managed, though the thought of spending the rest of his life with the people in Rufus Memorial Hospital made him feel vaguely nauseous. "My day was—"

The phone started to ring. For a moment Myde's mother looked torn between picking it up and ignoring it, but made up her mind quickly. Flashing Myde a sheepish smile, she moved to answer the ringing. She took a moment to read the caller ID before turning back to her son.

"Sorry honey, this call is really important."

"It's okay." Myde stood, untangling his messenger bag where it had hooked around the chair.

"Ah, Mr. Nomura!" the blonde woman said into the phone, cheer seeming just a little contrived. "Could you perhaps hold a moment? Thank you." Myde's mother peered around the edge of her office chair, a genuinely apologetic look on her girlish face. "There's a charity dinner tonight too, so you'll have to ask Ms. White to make you dinner."

_Nothing new there_. Myde kept that comment to himself.

And then his mother was off, lost in a world of copy, production and people-pleasing. "So Mr. Nomura, we need to discuss the distribution of…"

_I'll just… be in my room_, Myde mouthed, but she had already turned away.

The hallway tile was cold under his socks, and with a frustrated huff, Myde dropped his shoes next to the door into the garage. It wasn't what his mother had had in mind when she'd said he knew where shoes went, but there was a ninty-nine percent chance she'd never notice his Converse laying there in the hall.

_Of course she won't notice_. Even in his head, the words sounded whiny and childish. Myde knew how important work was to his mother. Financial success was how she defined her personal success. It had been _Destati_ that had kept her alive and sane after—Myde shook his head wildly to stop the thought before it got any farther.

Myde knew how important work was to his mother. He just sometimes… wished it would stop following her home.

The stairs up to his room seemed impossibly high, and Myde barely managed trudge up them. The click of his bedroom door behind him was like bliss, and he collapsed with abandon onto his spongy mattress. The blankets were warm from sunlight that had filtered through the window all day, and Myde was sorely tempted to fall asleep right then and there.

The starchy scratching of his scrub was the only thing that kept him awake, and grudgingly, the blond stood, pulling the baggy shirt over his head and kicking out of the drawstring pants. The navy uniform landed in a pile, joining the many pieces of clutter coating Myde's carpet. He'd have to wash the scrub later tonight… but that was later.

Wearily, the blond pulled on a pair of pajama pants (also courtesy the floor; the dresser was just too far away). But even after getting out of his uncomfortable uniform, Myde couldn't make himself to sit still for more than a few seconds. There were just too many thoughts running, non-stop, through his head.

So, Myde did what he often did when he felt overwhelmed: he played guitar.

Mindful of his mother's conversation, Myde chose the lower-pitched bass guitar over his electric, and turned the volume on the amp down fairly low. Slinging the strap over his bare shoulder, the blond ran experimental fingers over the fretboard, relishing the familiar metal hum of his calluosed fingers against the strings. The Aerodyne Classic was one of the few expensive gifts he had accepted from his mother, and its ash body—painted in stock sapphire—was smooth and polished despite heavy use.

Resting his thumb on the Precision pick-up, Myde plucked at the four strings, adjusting the tuning keys ever so slightly. Once he was satisfied with the guitar's sound, he plucked twice at the E string before lauching into the bassline of "Re:Birth", his favorite song by _Kingdom Come_.

Singing had never been Myde's forte, so he kept time by playing the song in his head, picking up the chords and remembering the fever pitch of the singer's voice.

…_he says we've been living underground…_

Myde shifted his hand to float across the lower strings, deadening the notes there as he played the perfect fourth of the bridge.

…_been asleep in a memory, dreaming…_

Pushing into the riff again, Myde could feel the strings vibrating against his dancing fingertips, and the habitual motion of the song worked through him like freezing water, driving off the sting of bumps and bruises and clearing his head, focusing his mind on just the low, repetitive thumping of the bass.

…_the spell was broken by this sound…_

The music was inside him, pounding against his skull and then further in, rattling, filling his chest as if it were hollow. The resonance seemed neverending, shaking his ribs and pressing against his throat; it brushed along the nerves of his spine like icy hands beneath his skin.

Then his hand slipped onto the pick guard, fingers stretching through air for something that was not there. Missing? What was he looking for?

The fifth and sixth strings were missing.

_A unique instrument… characterized by six upper strings… called a si—_

His hands played on, writing empty melodies.

And he _was_ hollow.

It was like being dead but never having died, and his limbs were not his own and he didn't seem to fit right in his body and he _wanted_ to be afraid but couldn't. No fear. No joy.

_The music keeps going and… _Myde was a black hole, standing in a cluttered bedroom, stealing breaths and memories and feelings.

…_cut out my heart, but the wound is healing…_

A dying riff left the dusk-darkened room in silence, left Myde with the sensation of waking up and falling asleep and fading and being half or whole, himself but _not_.

Zexion's cobalt stare glinted in his mind.

"What's… happening to me?"

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ŵāκε – τ ħ ė – Ŵāηđεŗίηġ – Şρίŗίŧ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

1) As always, crazy amounts of credit go to my wonderful beta-reader, **Distorted Gaze**.

2) So many people were correct in answering the trivia that I have to dedicate chapters two by two! The correct answer was **The Masque of the Red Death**, by Edgar Allan Poe. Each of the seven rooms of Prince Prospero's castle is draped in a separate color: the first with blue, the second with purple… so on to "_the sixth with violet_". The violet room is also notable because it sits between the white and black rooms.

3) **Trivia Time!** (Again…) Myde's mother's name, _Mariana_, is significant for two reasons. The first is geographic, and the second is literary. Can you guess both reasons? (Hint: If you Wikipedia "Mariana", you can find both answers!)

4) The lyrics at the end of this chapter are a slightly edited version of Sam Roberts's "Higher Learning".

5) More than 100 reviews for one chapter? Thank you all so much! It's so amazing to get so much feedback. I always welcome constructive criticism—does anyone know anything about playing the guitar?—and I love to hear from you guys!

Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alert list!


	5. Gather in the Gale

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar  
_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ II  
_

Ëηŧŗăŧā – Äđāġίσ :

Ģăŧђεŗ – ίη – ŧ ђ ε – Ģăłė

This chapter is dedicated to ButterflyxSoup and Because Azrail is Not Enough.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Myde saw_ _himself falling. From somewhere outside (_or very deep inside_, a far-off voice offered)—from somewhere outside he saw his own sandy hair snatched at by wind that bubbled like water as he tore through its surface. _Or is it water that blows like wind?

_He saw himself plummeting into an infinite darkness. Distant fear coiled in the stomach he was no longer attached to._

_But he _was _attached. He could feel the cold rush of air ripping at his skin, his stomach turning and then weightlessness setting in. He could feel himself plummeting headfirst from a lightless sky into a lightless sea, or from sea to sky—unbroken dark—except something was not quite right, because he could see his own body falling. Suddenly he was inside his body, suddenly outside—every time he blinked the perspective changed. One moment he was inside, with the harsh snapping of his clothing and the stinging prickle of hair in his eyes, and then _blink_, he was far away, invisible, falling just as fast but feeling nothing._

_Then there was light shining from below. A glow both soft and neon filtered upward, brushing warm against his shoulders. Myde watched the liquid darkness slow his fall to nearly floating. Suspended gravity righted him, and the moment his feet touched the glowing floor, Myde was very firmly back inside his body, his_ _invisible, formless self expanding to fill in all the empty places from his toes to his fingers. _

_He stumbled over a sunken valley of grout on the floor and barely managed to stay standing. _

"_What… is this place?"_

_A voice that he heard only in his head murmured, _The Station of Regret_._

"…_Who said that?" There was no answer._

_His eyes, adapted to the light already, could make out nothing in the infinite dark overhead. Turning his gaze to the floor, Myde realized he was standing on the horizontal face of a giant stained-glass window. Myde froze, suddenly unsure of whether or not the floor could even hold his weight. But after a few awkward, crane-like steps, Myde's caution was overwhelmed by curiosity. The shards of glowing glass below formed a pattern he couldn't quite see from so close. With careful steps, Myde headed away from the middle of the great glass window. Looking over the side_ _sent another jolt of nervousness down his spine-the edge, he found, was a sheer drop-off. If he fell from here, it'd be down forever into the abyss. _

_From the edge of the tower though, Myde was able to get better grasp of the window's design—and the faces that were on it. Myde traced the nearest black grout circle, taking in the mosaic it enclosed. He was nearly back to where he'd started when the malachite green eyes and artfully twisted brown hair added up in his head to a stained-glass copy of Aerith Gainsborough._

"_Miss Aerith?" he couldn't help but double-take. She looked younger, and her closed-lip smile seemed stronger and sweeter than usual. But what he could see of her shoulders were clothed in familiar coral pink, and the twisted strands of brunette hair framed her face just as they did every day in Rufus Memorial._

_Myde stared for another moment before curiosity called him on to the next great circle. Brown hair again, but with those storm grey eyes, it was impossible for Myde to mistake. _

"_Leon." The stern glass face had an element of darkness about it that Myde's friend didn't. _

_Myde hurried on, not pausing to stop and compare. Not every circle on the platform held a face; he darted over electric blue and yellow and green stars and arrows, a giant bell, and a Dalmatian puppy before he reached another familiar face—Cid Highwind's._

_With barely a second glance, Myde raced past the stubbly face of Cloud's mechanic boss, who was always doing work on Flounder for Myde. The intern kept on, nearly coming full circle before the last of the mosaic portraits appeared under his feet. _

"_Yuffie!" A cheeky glass grin under beer-bottle colored eyes caught the light and seemed inexplicably alive. _

_He wanted to stop and compare this Yuffie to his best friend, but something was pulling at his eyes. Without his consent Myde's head lifted, and his gaze met with glass in a too-familiar shade of aqua._

_With reverent steps Myde traced the largest circle, the center circle that he'd landed in. Staring back was a face he could never in a million years forget: his own. Except… Except… There was some measure of difference, something not quite right about it. Vaguely Myde thought of the children's books with see-through plastic pages, painted so that pictures could be overlain, so that caterpillars on a leaf could chrysalize without moving at all. The great glass portrait was Myde, but with something laid over it—_or with something missing_. There were dull blue shadows inlaid under mosaic eyes, and the tilt of its nearly-frowning lips was too harsh to be _Myde…

_In the middle of the replica's chest was a jagged, gapping hole of black glass. Milk white glass fingers—but _Myde's _skin wasn't pale—buried in the rim of the hole. If they were pulling it open or pushing it closed, _Myde _couldn't tell. _

_Somewhere in the back of his head, like a very old memory, _Myde _knew he was supposed to be afraid. _Myde _knew that black holes where hearts were meant to be was not a good sign, knew that there was some important message here he was supposed to be getting, but just could _not _reach... _

That's not me_, _Myde _thought under a sudden surge of anxiety. _That's definitely not me, and it's not going to be me or anything_. Except… Except…_

_The emptiness of its heart couldn't compare to the look in its dead glass eyes. _Myde _knew how to handle regret and fear—but over those, the glass aqua eyes bled endless _desire_._

_What could any person want so badly to put a look that painful on an imitation's face?_

I don't want to know.

Myde _knew that he had never felt that way—knew that he didn't want to feel that way. He didn't want to feel—_

_The glass tower trembled. _

Myde _stumbled, wind milling his arms to keep upright. He whipped his head around as if to ask the void what was going on._

Do not be afraid, _said the voice _Myde _could not hear with his ears_.

_A sickening _crack _rent the air, and behind the Myde who was not _Myde, _behind its eyes that wanted, the background of giant stained-glass doors, cut to look like wood, split down the middle. Chips of glass and grout sprayed across the floor. _

_The glass tower gave one final shudder and shattered._

This is the beginning of a story that has already ended, _murmured the voice, as Myde and a thousand glittering shards rained down into the dark._

_He forced his eyes to stay open this time, despite the way the sharp wind (_or stinging water?_) made them water and burn. Upside down, he saw the enormous panes of glass glint in nonexistent light. They spun so slowly that it seemed they were immune to gravity, and he quickly left them behind—a sky of sharp-edged stars, glittering out one by one._

_Far below, a pale grey light appeared._

_Myde watched the face of another stained-glass tower materialize. He squinted through the water in his eyes to see it, trapping its design in his memory. The mysterious force that ignored gravity slowed his descent and set him down neatly on the glass floor._

The Station of Remembrance, _announced the soundless voice. _

_Up close, it was hard to tell which grey and blue shard of glass belonged to what in the overall picture, but Myde knew what it looked like without having think. His glimpse of it from above shined in front of his eyes, no detail missing. _

_Around the dark center picture, there were twelve smaller portraits, a motley collection of faces peeking out under pitch black hoods. The pictures were laid out like hours on the face of a clock, one neat number marked under each. There were only two problems with the design: where the number nine should have been, there was just deep grey background—and Myde was fairly certain clocks only counted to twelve. The portrait with the electric blue glass eyes and the number XIII didn't seem to belong._

_Then there was VI. Myde tried not to think about how familiar the cobalt and blue-steel colors were. He tried not to think about a lot of things (_have you at least remembered—_) while his eyes refused to look away from the man whose name Myde knew without knowing why._

"_Zexion…" Myde knew he should be confused, nervous, but it was like he'd left his worry with the glass shards far above._

_He could only stare so long at the portrait that was Ienzo and so obviously was not before an unpleasant churning in his stomach—not quite curiosity—told him to give in and inspect the center of the massive window._

_It was as arresting as the last: with a vacant sort of grin, another type of Myde was staring blankly upward. He was not the same as the last and not the same as _Myde_, but _Myde _knew somehow, without being told, that they were inseparable from each other. The deep black hood over the other's face hid hair that must have been swept back, because only a few strands had been left to dangle in the replica's face—a face that was not pale like the last had been, but was not quite as tan as _Myde_, who had picked up color from the hot city sun all summer. _

_There was a lighter air to this portrait than the last had had; that indiscriminate desire was completely gone, washed over by a more approachable, if shallow, look. _

_If it hadn't all felt so… hollow… Myde would have said he liked this place. Or… that he didn't dislike this place? Because he didn't really like it; there was nothing about it that made him want to stay. But there was nothing about it that made him want to leave, either._

_That was when Myde realized there was someone else standing on the great glass window—someone who hadn't been there a moment before._

"_Hmmm, still stuck." the stranger murmured to himself in a voice Myde knew because it was his own. The stranger's black leather cloak swished back and forth to the rhythm of his pacing, and its hood obscured his face entirely._

"_Um… hello?" Myde called._

"_Uwah!" The stranger spun around mid-pace, training his shadowed face on Myde. "Oh…It's you." _

"_Uh…" Myde took a step back as the man bounded across the tower and slid to a stop in front of him. "W-Who are _you_?"_

_The face beneath the black cloak cocked to the side. A moment of abject silence broke into the creak of leather when the stranger reached up and pulled his hood off._

_Myde choked on his breath; his gaze darted between the center circle and the boy who was standing in front of him. _

_Blue-green eyes—a little bluer than Myde's—stared up from the floor and under the stranger's light eyelashes. The glass copy's strands of hair matched the breathing copy right in front of Myde, although the black hood on the floor had not been hiding swept back hair. Instead, it had hidden hair that virtually stood on end in a style that Myde was pretty sure had gone out of fashion about twenty years ago. If, he amended, it had ever been in fashion at all._

"_Hey," the stranger grinned, "do you know how to get out of here? I've been here a while and it's starting to get really boring." _

"_I don't even know where—"_

"_I'm tired of this place. The darkness has already started moving, and I'm still stuck here."_

"_Stuck here?" Myde couldn't make any sense of the look-alike's words._

_A black gloved hand gestured toward the infinite black. "Here, in this place."_

"_What is this place?" Something like a glimmer of frustration set Myde's teeth on edge._

"_It's a prison," and the stranger's blue-green eyes had narrowed, and Myde got the sudden overwhelming sense that the boy in the black cloak was not as pleasant as he seemed. "It's a prison made by your memories."_

"My _memories?" Myde started._

"_Seesh! No way was I_ _this dense," the stranger muttered defensively. "You know, memories, like the things in your head—"_

"_I didn't mean _that_! I meant… How can you make a prison out of memories?" The far-away frustration plucking at Myde's jaw seemed a bit closer._

"_Well that's simple," the stranger rolled his eyes. "You just lock up part of yourself." He shrugged._

_It was weird and crazy and just impossible, but doubt was farther off than frustration in Myde's head. He'd known from the very beginning that they were connected, that—_

"_You're a part of me?"_

"_Who knows," the other boy shrugged. "It could be the other way around." His shrug turned into a nonchalant stretch, black sleeves straining when he straightened his arms over his head. _

"_You're wrong."_

_The stranger fell out of his languid pose at the sound of Myde's voice. "You're wrong," Myde repeated. "You _are _a part of me, but it doesn't work both ways." The firm resolution in his voice surprised even Myde, who had no idea how exactly he knew what he did._

_The boy in black stopped grinning._

"_Who do you think you are?" His too-blue eyes narrowed at Myde._

"_I'm—" But Myde found that he could not finish the sentence, because he didn't _know_. Very suddenly he didn't know who he was, what name to call himself—"Myde" didn't fit in the way it should; it settled over him like an ill-fitting coat. "I'm..."_

_The other boy smiled—not quite real, but closer than anyone else could have managed in his place. "Guess 'who do you _think _you are' is the right question after all!"_

"_I'm Myde!" he forced himself to say. "I'm Myde Cistern!" But the words might as well have been inaudible—they were as hollow and uncomfortable as silence. _

"Are _you Myde?" the stranger asked, tone bordering on amusement. But as he asked it, he took a menacing step forward—and then another._

_Myde stepped back, and then back twice more to keep some semblance of distance between them._

"_Are you really Myde?" The boy took another step forward. _

_Myde's heel brushed air and he_ _realized with a start that they were at the edge of the tower. The stranger took another step forward, reaching out to fist his hands in Myde's collar. _

"_I'm—" _

_The stranger shuddered without moving, flickering like a bad projection. Except he wasn't fading or_ _crackling out or anything; he was a bad movie projection caught between two scenes. Black bled white, blue eyes bled green, and hair that stood on end suddenly fell uncombed around his face. They were trapped in the erratic beat of a strobe light—only there wasn't any light._

_Black. White. Black. White._

_The stranger _pushed_._

_Myde teetered for a moment, one foot on nothing but air. He reached out to grab something—anything—but caught emptiness instead._

_Myde had the time to take one shuddering breath before he plunged backward over the side of the great glass tower. _

_Above, the stranger stopped flickering. He did not settle back into his leather coat or his impossible hairstyle; he settled into Myde's. And as he fell, Myde watched his own outstretched hand flashing._

_White. Black. White. Black._

_By the fading light of the glass window, Myde_ _saw a black glove flicker over his hand and refuse to vanish. Wings of a black leather coat slapped hard around his feet._

_The darkness licked upward, curling over his eyes, muffling his voice, stealing away his breath, and somehow he knew that this time, no invisible force, no elegant window would slow his fall into the infinite darkness. Though he couldn't see it, he felt the stranger smiling down. That voice that sounded exactly like his own carried over the melody of the rushing wind—_

"_See you later, Demyx." _

"_But I'm—" Wind tore his voice away. _

_The boy in black plunged down into the watery dark, his too-blue eyes sliding closed._

_Someone... Someone help me... HELP ME..._

Myde woke up in his own bed with the taste of someone else's words on his lips.

A dull orange glare spilled through the window into the room from the streetlight outside, painting the glossy posters on his walls in neon colors. Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten—deep blue instead of black. If Myde lifted his head off the pillow, he could see Dawn City's skyline, a thick bundle of towers. It reminded him of the toy blocks he'd seen in Rufus Memorial's rec. room.

This sudden reminder of his job made Myde jerk, and he rolled over to look at the alarm clock glowing on his cluttered nightstand. Garish red numbers burned his half-open eyes.

2:47 AM. Still an hour before he had to be up…

Myde fell back onto his pillow with a sigh. His eyelids felt like two little lead bricks, but there was no chance of getting back to sleep now—not with that faint brush of _feeling_ still beating under his ribs. He'd been helpless in the dream, watching without being able to change anything.

Myde didn't want to go back to that empty place again.

Except… it had been his own doubles... his own... Myde didn't know what to call them. The only thing that had truly terrified him in the dark place was himself—or who he was _supposed_ to be. But who was he supposed to be, if not for himself? The blond could feel the beginnings of a headache beating in his temples.

_None of this stuff makes sense!_ Other worlds and hearts and Organizations and Demyx and the Sora Syndrome… Myde's thoughts chased and attacked each other. He could almost see them—with stars fluttering around their very confused faces—leaping off mental cliffs and river-dancing along the inside of his skull. Great. Rufus Memorial Hospital was driving him insane. Myde wondered if his mother would sue.

He lay in bed for a long while, unmoving, unable to decide if he wanted dawn to come quickly or to never come at all. The thought of getting up and going through the day like nothing was wrong, of smiling at Belle as he walked right back into the place that had started all this… It was almost enough to make Myde curl in a ball under his covers and refuse to come out ever again. But his covers didn't have answers to the questions burning holes in his head—this stuff started in Rufus Memorial, and his only chance to make sense of it all lay there too.

But did he _want_ to make sense of it?

There he was, right at the beginning again; his thoughts were mice in exercise wheels: running and running and getting nowhere.

When a quiet mechanical _whirr_ issued from the clock on his nightstand a while later, Myde was so deep in his own contemplations that he didn't notice it. He did notice, however, when the _whirr _was quickly replaced by his FM radio alarm.

"_And though I know the world of real emotion has surrounded me_," the song blared out of the clock's tiny speakers, "_I won't give in to it! Now I know that forward is the only way my heart can go… I hear your voice calling out to me: 'You'll never be—_"

Myde slapped the 'off' button, plunging the dark room into silence again. "Sorry Yuna. No more real emotion."

For a minute or so, the blond deliberated between getting up or rolling right back over and never moving again. _I can't call in sick on my second day!_ the goody-good side of his brain whined. Unfortunately for Myde, that side happened to be most in line with reality. If he didn't show up to work this morning, he could probably kiss his entire internship good-bye.

At 3:51 AM, four minutes after his alarm clock had rung, Myde slithered out from under his comforter and, wobbling, leaned to scoop his scrub off the cluttered bedroom floor. He never had gotten around to washing it yesterday. O_h well_… He tumbled into his dresser and dragged out the last clean pair of boxers in the drawer. His scrub was apparently the least of his laundry concerns. Feeling the lack of sleep pounding behind his eyes, Myde slouched off toward the bathroom.

The steam and blinding heat of his shower was a momentary comfort, and when he left it, the cold air outside the shower door was twice as sharp and unwelcoming. Chill settled over his dampened skin and turned the drops dripping down the back of his neck into miniature ice cubes. He slipped on the navy scrub and his boxers and pants, watching them turn black in the places he had not thoroughly dried. Still toweling off his hair, Myde wandered out of the bathroom and down the stairs.

The air in the house was cool and still, with only Myde's breath to stir it. Shadows clung in every odd corner as he shuffled along the hall. The dull light of the early morning seemed to steal color from everything and filled the hall with heaviness—deep water that each of Myde's footsteps disturbed. For a moment, the blond entertained the idea that he'd gone to sleep in reality and woken up in a black and white film. His footsteps on the floor sounded scratchy and metallic; he could almost hear the distant jazz music, echoing from some far away phonograph.

Then he whispered into the kitchen and his mother made the illusion real. She was folded—neat as the wing of a bird—at the kitchen island, in a sleek, black evening gown that glittered starry silver. Soft, pressed-in curls of cornsilk gold framed her oval face—a halo that dyed her skin cloudy cream. She seemed off-focus—blurry around the edges—and the cranberry juice (Myde would have though it was wine, except that he had never seen his mother even touch alcohol) in the fluted glass she was nursing was as grey as the rest of the world.

Still, like a wax figurine, Mariana was every heroine Myde had ever watched selling tinted smiles on the silver screen, every fur-wrapped media sweetheart, with the ghost of a long cigarette holder between her lips.

It was in that moment—the bare seconds before she lifted her gaze to look at him—that Myde remembered his mother was only seventeen years older than him.

And that he had ruined her life.

"Yes, that's right," Mariana murmured suddenly, more to herself than anyone else. Her lips, in day-old _Coral Shell_ lipstick, waxed into a white crescent smile. "You go to work this early now…"

Myde thought about a hundred things in the span of only a few seconds. He thought about asking his mother why she had never gone to sleep after coming home from the charity dinner last night. He thought about telling her to pour the rest of the too-warm juice down the sink. He thought about asking her why she was sitting in an empty kitchen at four in the morning.

But none of these things made it to the tip of Myde's tongue. Instead, he scratched sheepishly at the back of his head—still wet—and whined, "I _wanna_ sleep in."

Mariana's laugh was the trill of a crystal flute: high and twinkling. "There's my baby."

"I'm almost twenty-one," Myde pouted, half from offense and half from desperation. Joking with her was safe, wasn't alone in a kitchen in the dark.

She was drowsy teasing. "You'll always be my little baby boy, who had the fattest little cheeks, and the biggest blue eyes, just like—" And then her humor evaporated as fast as a water drop poured into a hot metal pan, boiled off her face and left just a desperate sort of blankness behind.

"Mom…"

"You're the only one I need now My'." She closed her eyes. "You're the only one I've ever needed."

Myde could hear the voice of the dark place, whispering: _Alone. The only one… You've always been…_

He smiled—two pins holding up the corners of his mouth—wanted to say Mariana didn't need anyone (their house was proof enough of that), but in the cold morning light she seemed as fragile as a porcelain doll; her eyes were two marbles of sage-colored glass.

"You should…. get some sleep," Myde stumbled.

Mariana's gaze was somewhere over the top of his head, most likely on the clock on the wall. "When did you have to leave for work?" she asked.

"Umm… Four forty-five…" The sneaking suspicion that rattled its way down Myde's spine was only confirmed when Mariana jerked.

"It's already five!" She waved her perfectly manicured hands at him frantically. "You're late! Go get your things. Hurry!"

Myde tripped out of the kitchen and back up to his bedroom. Snatching his messenger bag and throwing yesterday's clothes out of it, the blond careened down the stairs for the second time that morning. Myde slipped across the hall tiles on his socks, and only the wall saved him from an untimely meeting with the floor. Shoving his feet roughly into his tattered Converse, Myde ripped open the door to the garage.

"My', wait!" Mariana called, high-heels clicking as she sailed out of the kitchen and pushed an apple into his hands. "Doctors-in-training have to eat!" she scolded. It was hardly the breakfast he'd meant to grab, but it would do.

Halfway in and out of the garage, Myde paused for the barest of seconds. "I love you, Mom," he managed.

In the dimness his mother sparkled black and white again, her face cool as a pane of glass. Painted lips pressed down into a half-staff smile.

Mariana waved him on.

Myde shut the garage door behind himself and, biting deep into the apple to hold his meager breakfast, kicked _Flounder_ to a start. Over the knocking of the engine, he thought about his mother, alone in a kitchen while the sun came up.

_You can never get rid of it_

—the dark place welling in the corners of his mind—

_You can never fill it_

—a hole that memories whistled through—

Juice from the blood-red apple ran cold over his lips and down his chin.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

It hit him suddenly, like a wall of unintelligible screaming—a shriek growing higher, louder, loud enough to burst—Ienzo sat up in bed at 2:47 AM and listened to the sound of a far away voice, calling…

The room smelled like ice and ammonia.

Ienzo drew a rattling breath, so cold it stung his teeth. Sliding out from between the sheets (_quiet as frost forming, the draw of his marble legs on cotton_), he traced the snow field of his floor with wary toes. The barren tile burned the soles of his feet as he slid across it, and when he reached the window, dull shine from the lights in the parking lot radiating through the blinds painted slats of ghostly color over his face.

Back lit, the stripes of darkness might as well have been steel bars.

The sense of being trapped snuck up on him suddenly (_quiet as frost forming_), kissed the nape of his neck with hot breaths, smiled from under his eyelids, scraped down the veins on the backs of his hands, his wrists, the delicate capillaries in the bends of his fingers.

_Everything you are_ (not), _everything you are_ (not) _will always be…here where there is no one. _

Except it was his own voice—Zexion's? Ienzo's? Whose?—whispering those words into his mouth, his ears.

_To the _— _seeking freedom, this _— _is a prison, surrounded by _—.

The familiar (feeling?) of the flesh of his ankles turning into lead pinned him to the floor—a living statue (_his marble legs_) shackled to something less real than the air. It wasn't as if he didn't always know he was a prisoner, it was just that when the city was dark he knew it more.

Like a silent avalanche, Ienzo felt the world collapse in degrees: a top spinning with his empty body as its needle-point.

_In this tiny place…_

The violet walls buckled, spun, turned his words into a hurricane, into—

_In this tiny place, you…_

Tops are not perpetual. Lives are not perpetual. Around, around, (_the draw of_) turning, the air a little thinner every time, his words became just möbius strips of black—not enough of them yet. This Ienzo changes nothing, adds nothing, is(n't)...

…_do not truly exist at all. _

The whole world slowed, one last lethargic turn that narrowed it down to the single bone white tile where he stood, and then it fell on its side and took his mind along.

It wasn't claustrophobia, it was—_no one to hear you_—the way he couldn't move, not forward. No choice—_he who understands nothing_—not sure if there ever was—_can know nothing_—a purpose.

Illusions (_lies, lies, lies_) had always been (his?) forte, and he as stood in front of the dark-light-dark-light window, Ienzo turned Rufus Memorial, the violet room, into the biggest places (he?) knew:

_The Great Maw, pale and empty, upon whose stone cliffs _Ienzo _carved out geological samples—and sometimes, feeling rebellious, his own name…_

_The endless savannah of the Pride Lands, where Zexion put himself out of the way and, under the pretense of categorizing the world's inhabitants, spent hours in the warm wind stipulating about the heart he didn't have…_

_The Bailey _Ienzo _walked every morning on Lord Ansem's orders; above a quiet hum from the market square and the rush of the Rising Falls at his back, his castle home settled, a blossoming presence on his mind, white and unfurling like a lily… _

_The snow-capped summit in the Land of Dragons, where the Heartless fluttered about like flocks of birds. Zexion stood still until his feet were numb and wet through his heavy boots; blinking snowflakes from his eyelashes, he stared out at the vastness of the world and remembered how to feel awe…_

Ienzo kept thinking until he no longer felt Rufus Memorial creeping under the first layer of his skin, until he remembered what the city smelled like on the humid afternoons when he'd taken the bus home from elementary school, until he remembered what his mother (_mothers: _Ienzo _had had one too_) looked like.

And when the spell of urgency (_not insanity not insanity_) had passed completely, Ienzo took the black sharpie off the windowsill, turned his back on the bars of the blinds, and settled on the icy floor of his room.

The wet tip of the sharpie pressed against the wall, marking a pool of darkness (_like nothing-blood, vanishing on the white floor of Oblivion_) that grew as he pressed down harder.

For a moment, the words wouldn't come, and then, in a rush, the pen seemed to dart across the violet of its own accord.

_The ninth member of the Organization was always a study in contradictions…_

And despite what he had told Aerith, _this_ was why he wrote: to cover the walls of his tiny prison with layers and layers of worlds.

Illusion had always been his forte.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Away from the distractions of his home, the thoughts Myde had been avoiding came back in force.

_Just don't think about it…_But it was hopeless—the less he tried to think about them, the more palpable the thoughts became.

Something was terribly wrong with him. _Something_ had happened the moment Myde had stepped foot in the psychiatric ward of Rufus Memorial Hospital.

And Ienzo knew what.

The thought took Myde by surprise, but didn't frighten him. Since last night he had been feeling…shallow, like he had suddenly stepped out of the world and now, coming back, nothing seemed quite the same. Yesterday morning this place had been deep and real, and he had been a part of it. Now, as he rattled past the cookie-cutter houses of his gated neighborhood, Myde had fallen right back into the black and white movie: Aurora Heights rolled across the lightened screen, but he was sitting in the dim theatre listening to the whispers of invisible patrons.

Morning stillness lay heavy on Dawn City's skyline—a sheen of pearly grey sweat floating in the air. Cars like ghosts flickered at the edges of Myde's sight, distantly purring. Gulping down the muffled air, _Flounder_'s engine churned and echoed.

It was an eerie sort of stillness, even for the early hour, and Myde couldn't help but compare the empty sidewalks to the void rattling under his ribs.

Then, all of the sudden—it rushed over him in a wave—Myde realized he'd gone deaf. All the echoing noise from before just had… stopped. The last car had turned down a side street and left him alone; though _Flounder_'s engine still shook beneath him, it now rumbled on without making a sound.

_For help? Called?_

Myde flinched, and _Flounder_ wobbled from its steady path on the pavement. The wheel made no noise as it crushed a soda can in the street.

_Needs help? You called?_ A pair of voices, high and static-like, inhuman, in his head…

Myde's steady grip on the handlebars of his moped slipped again.

_Called! Called us! Nocturne! _A cacophony of soprano voices, shattering notes, closer than before but—Myde lifted a hand to slam fingers to his pounding temple. He was hearing things—not the right things—hearing…

_The Melodious Nocturne! We'll come! We'll come!_

He sped past a woman on the sidewalk, crisp in her suit, and her heels made no sound where they struck the sidewalk. Not that he could hear anything over—

_My lord, my lord, my lord!_ An endless stream of voices blending and clashing until he could not tell one from the other, couldn't recognize them, couldn't breathe…

There was no time to stop. The empty air in front of him was suddenly a pool of black and violet—_a hole that memories whistled through_—suddenly pale white skin. He swerved—not enough—and his moped slammed into a living body. Flesh caved sickeningly, spun off to the side of the handle bar; all traction lost, _Flounder_ dropped and skid, grinding metal on asphalt at thirty-five miles an hour, dragging Myde along.

Something _shrieked_.

Glass from the side mirror—almost torn completely off—littered the ground around his hand and arm. He could feel his elbow bleeding, his heart beating blood out of him faster than his brain could count beats, and for what felt like an eternity, Myde could not open his eyes.

He hadn't hit his head. He was just scraped, but... he'd ran over something—someone—and not lightly.

_Oh God… Oh God… I killed…_ The words became a mantra in his head, building until guilt and morbidity cracked his eyelids open at last.

For a moment, Myde was confused. A pair of high heels from hell were floating three inches from his face.

They were solid black and incredibly thin, tapering to wicked, upswept points as if they were meant to be bayonets, not shoes. For a good minute or so, the blond couldn't look anywhere else. Why exactly were the shoes floating? His head _pounded_ behind his eyes, at the base of his skull, and Myde thought that maybe he had bashed his brains on the ground after all. Then he looked up.

Myde screamed, and in answer, the creatures floating over him wriggled their fluid-like bodies.

_Lord Demyx! Lord Demyx!_ The voices belonged to them, they were speaking… But dear God, their mouths were sewn shut! Myde thought he might throw up—from the intense headache or from revulsion, he didn't know. Hook-like hands—_no fingers, no fingers_—reached out and brushed him, cold and clammy and with too much give, like the creatures were made out of rubber rather than skin.

Wincing and whimpering, Myde scrambled backward, until his shoulders ran into something wriggling. He twitched, catching sight of a dusty pink pant leg (rubbery as the monsters' flesh) in the corner of his eye.

His gaze darted about, desperate to reach the gaps that were closing between writhing black-pink-white bodies, with their stitched mouths and the caps pulled low over their eyes—did they even _have_ eyes? He stumbled to his knees, tried to crawl (to dash, he meant) through them.

Myde felt something like a sob threatening to tear its way out of his throat as even more of the monsters suddenly appeared, swimming out of black wormholes in the air. They swarmed down on him, pushing against each other to be closest to him, to try and touch him.

_Came! Came! We came! Lord Demyx needs us? Such a long time… _

"S-Stop it!" Pale fingers dug into the sides of his head, tangled in the messy sand strands and pressed tightly to the warm curves of his ears. "I'm dreaming!"

Anything to stop those voices, saying… saying…

_Lord Demyx?_ the monster choir sung.

_Welcome to the Organization, Demyx._

_Kingdom…_

_Are you looking for a meaning?_

…_Hearts_

_Have you at least remembered—_

"STOP IT!" His scream froze the creatures in mid-movement, and they trained sightless faces on him. Not even their chests moved with breath.

Myde was not about to let the moment slip away. Hurling himself under the floating creatures, he jerked _Flounder_ upright, adrenaline making him forget his bruises. Slamming the key around, the blond prayed the moped's fall hadn't damaged an already unreliable motor.

The engine turned over once, twice, coughed and then, miraculously, caught. Myde clenched his eyes shut and ripped back on the throttle, leaning low on the (slightly bent) handle bar. _Flounder_ lurched forward through the crowd of monsters. Myde tried to steer straight as possible as bodies with the consistency of ten-day-old gelatin bumped against his hands and shoulders.

_Get away, get away, get away! _Myde whimpered, not sure if he meant it for the monsters or himself. Aquamarine eyes opened to slits as _Flounder_ hurtled jerkily down the road. Myde didn't dare to look back. For a long moment there was only silence; his heart almost dared to slow its frantic drumming, and then—

_Orders? What does Lord Demyx need? _

The creatures were dancing after him, flocking alongside _Flounder_ like the devil's idea of birds. Myde jerked harder on the throttle, barely able to see straight between the terror and the shaking of the moped. He couldn't get away from them, even with the weak engine straining at its max. Bayonet heels skated across the air inches from his knees; sightless faces floated in and out of view—ghosts or aliens or… what, he didn't know.

_Are we reaping? _They all spoke together, one mind. _Should we reap? The Heartless?_

"NO! G-GO—" Myde flailed and struck the nearest monster. The blow glanced aside as if his arm had been made of a rolled-up sheet of paper.

_Going? Where are we going?_

Myde cut a corner, coming dangerously close to slamming into a fire hydrant. _Flounder_ clattered over the curb. For a moment the blond thought he had escaped them: the creatures continued in a straight line as he'd turned. But almost instantly they spun—heels over heads—and strung out behind him, a perfect Danse Macabre.

_Are we looking? For something?_

Streets flashed by. "Stop following me!" Myde shrieked. Sightless faces pushed close around him, hooked hands plucked at his scrub.

_Orders? Those are orders? Where must we go?_

And then, like the cool touch of every sanctuary in the world, the glass walls of Rufus Memorial Hospital glittered dawn-gold and grey. There was no explanation for it, that sudden notion that if he could just get through the front doors, he'd get away—he'd be safe.

_Flounder_ screeched to the right, bounding the lip of the hospital parking lot. Behind Myde, the monstrous dance troop skated, kicking their wicked feet centimeters from his head.

_Just…_

Heedless of the blue emergency curb, Myde ripped to a stop, threw himself off the moped and pounded toward the hospital's front doors.

A monster sprung up between him and the shining glass entrance, mouth straining in an autopsy smile. They were around and against him suddenly, like rapturous worshippers. Their rubbery flesh brushed and squeaked. Myde backed away, tripped where the sidewalk met the manicured lawn and smashed into the cool grass. A low shrub scratched along his back, but he hardly felt it.

Blood beat against the side of every vein; Myde threw his hands over his head, curled knees against his chest. The sharp ringing in his head almost drowned out the thought:

_Why, why are they chasing me?_

His heart slammed again, bruising, tearing, too fast—like it might claw out from beneath his ribs and drip on to the sidewalk—and there was the dark place on his eyes, a film he couldn't shut out and couldn't break, and he couldn't see, _couldn't_—

_Lord Demyx, Lord Demyx, Lord Demyx!_

"LEAVE ME ALONE!" The howl of his voice hit the air, a hammer on the side of a massive bell. The creatures rustled nervously. "Go away!"

_Away? That was an order?_

"GO AWAY!" Myde choked. "P-Please…"

The rustling grew and then very suddenly quieted, punctuated only by warped sounds, mis-struck notes on an otherworldly instrument. At last, Myde dared to peek between the protective shields of his arms.

The monsters were vanishing into black and violet wormholes bubbling on the ground and tearing the air in two. A few of the creatures shot back what might have been, on human faces, misgiving looks. Amid their wriggling retreat, a glint of silver caught Myde's cautious, nervous stare.

One of the monsters was carrying _Flounder_'s side-view mirror away.

And then they were gone, quick as they'd appeared, and the places they'd danced seemed to ache with hollowness. Something, without warning, shattered inside him.

Myde laughed. Choking on air and breathing around the lump of fear in his throat, Myde buried his face in his bruised knees and giggled, in a type of quiet hysteria. It was easier to laugh than cry.

He was half in and half out of his body, adrenaline and terror sweating out and leaving a trembling ball on the dewy grass. His elbow pounded, a reminder of the moped accident, but so many thoughts were sprinting through Myde's head that pain barely registered. Neither did the morning cold, the dull sunlight. He was on his feet suddenly, didn't know how he'd gotten up. He didn't feel the shaking footsteps that carried him through the doors of Rufus Memorial Hospital.

"Myde?" Belle's soft blue eyes flung wide; her delicate mouth fell into a red "o". "You're bleeding!" She hurried around the desk in the time it took him to blink and lifted her slender hands to chase the scrape on his arm. "What happened to you?"

Myde heard, but answering was impossible. What happened? _What happened to me?_ The clinical silence of the hospital lobby pinned him down, until he felt like writhing for air. "Sorry… I'm late…" was the only thing the intern could manage.

"That's not important!" Belle insisted. "Are you all right?"

"C-Can I see Ienzo?" He hadn't meant to say it. He'd meant to say that he was fine, but some little part of him knew he wouldn't be, not until he could see Zexion and then everything would make sense and everything would be right and…

Belle's normally bright face slid into an unsure frown. Her hand tightened on his arm, just below the jagged scrape. "You should put something on this."

"It's… It's nothing." Myde mustered a shaking grin, ignored the voice asking when he'd gotten so used to lying. "Really."

Belle was not convinced—he could see it in the narrowing of her eyes, the sudden jut of her chin. "Myde, you can't just wander around hurt!" she warned. He didn't have the strength, or—he cringed back from her stubborn stare—the courage to stand against her, not this morning, when all he wanted to do was hide in his room, forget everything, never move…

"Where can I get a band-aid?" he surrendered. For a moment longer, Belle surveyed him, perhaps trying to gauge his truthfulness. Then her frown lightened, and she let him go.

"There's a nurse's station on the second floor, in the south wing."

He nodded, pretended to know which direction south was. Pain, setting in now, stabbed up from his knee with every step the blond took toward the elevator. He was only halfway there when Belle called for him to stop.

"Myde, your clearance card came this morning." Her flats clattered on the white tile floor, echoing in the empty lobby. Belle pressed the plastic ID into his hand reluctantly, her soft face an unusual mix of obstinacy and concern. She probably knew where…

Belle let him get on the elevator anyway. Myde pressed the button marked "3".

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The card refused to fit into the slot again, trembling across the door lock. Myde tightened one hand over the other. His fingernails buried in his wrist, useless at holding him still. All the fear and the helplessness from outside Rufus Memorial came rushing back, tinged by something he wanted to call anticipation, but—Myde wasn't sure what had him now, what was making it so hard to cross the bare distance.

The card slipped into the lock; neon red flickered green. He turned the cold steel handle.

Behind him, the door shut with a gunshot _click_.

Fifty shades of shadows patterned the room, carved up the walls and left a film in the air. The shade-dimmed sheets on the bed wrinkled at right angles—unkempt but just as unused. Silence pressed in every corner, muffled the sound of his shuddering breath. Even in the gold light of dawn and the luster of the violet walls, there was only blue-steel and bleach-white: the spider web-fine strands of Ienzo's hair, the stiff cotton cuffs creased in pale elbows.

Achingly slow, Ienzo pulled his hands from the word-stained wall, capped the ever present marker, and turned his gaze on the intern.

Chill from the violet-washed metal of the door seeped through Myde's scrub as he collapsed backward. His knuckles were bone white, fists straining; flakes of dry blood fell to spot the floor. He heaved: half-sob, half-nausea.

There was a note of near surprise in the cobalt eyes that swept Myde's face, arms, then the tear at the knee of his navy scrub. For a long moment, Ienzo only stared. At last, he sighed. "Should I ask how you ended up this way?"

And Myde wondered if he even _knew_, if Ienzo meant just this morning or if he meant ever, if he meant Demyx in the dark place, or if he meant—

Myde drew a tremulous breath, slid down onto the floor, ragged Converse squeaking across the tile. When he tried to speak, he choked on the words. "There were… there were these…" The blond bit his lip, pressed the heel of a hand into his eye. "There were monsters…"

A sharp inhalation—almost a hiss—rent the quiet. "Monsters?" Ienzo pressed as he crossed the violet room and came to stand over Myde. "Heartless?"

_Should we reap? The Heartless?_

"N-No…" Myde coughed around the lump in his throat. He wanted to ask Ienzo so many things, tell him what he saw—so why couldn't he move? Why was it so hard to speak? Ten thousand thoughts raged and tangled in his head, begging to be first on his tongue. He wanted to spill it all out, everything that had happened since they had met, but so much had happened that there was no place to start, no words for the feelings, the lack of feelings. Breathing deeply to slow the machine gun bursts of his heart, the blond gathered his thoughts, narrowed his mind down to a single point, the most pressing point.

"The monsters… were white with black crosses on their chests… and they had…" Myde realized how stupid he sounded, "pink pants."

Apparently Ienzo did not find his words stupid, because in an instant, he'd knelt down to look Myde in the face. His cobalt gaze flickered equal parts shock and intrigue, dilating with an inexplicable sort of desperation. "The _Dancers_? Are you saying that you were able to _summon_ the Dancers?"

Myde shrank back against the door, tasting blood in his mouth where he'd bitten through his lip. His throat tightened further, cutting off the air to his brain, which was struggling to make connections that were not there, trying to fill in the blanks with nothing to put in those holes... "Dancers? I don't… I don't _know_! I don't know what's happening! Please… explain it to me…" Myde lifted shaking aquamarine eyes, "Zexion."

Ienzo flinched like Myde's words burned. For the barest of seconds, his eyes—wide open—flashed with some feeling the intern couldn't name. Then Ienzo stood up and backed away, lifting curled fingers to his lips.

"You want me to help you…" he said, quiet and sharp with a sudden tremble of anger. "What do you want me to say _Myde_? That you're dreaming—that this is all a mistake and there's nothing _wrong_ with you?" Myde watched Ienzo's hand shake, black-stained fingers pressing down on pale lips as if to stifle the caustic words that were involuntarily spilling out.

Cobalt eyes brimming with black held Myde's gaze in the gray light. "Do you want me to tell you that everything will be okay if you just ignore it? This is not a dream."

But it sounded like Ienzo was saying it more to himself than to Myde.

For a long second, the silence pressed; Myde felt hot tears pricking in his eyes. "I just…" he mumbled, drew a shuddery breath. "Who am I?"

The venom burned out of Ienzo all at once. His caustic expression faded, leaving an ethereal glimpse of something Myde would later call empathy but now could not name.

"I only know," Ienzo murmured, "who you were."

Myde was frozen from his eyelashes to the arches of his feet by that voice like velvet over dry ice. It burned every synapse along his spine, beneath his skull. The intern's heart stopped and then slammed against his ribs.

"_Were_?" But in the deep, quiet parts of his mind he _knew_—knew it like he knew how to breathe. "What… do you mean?"

Ienzo moved with a sick sort of grace in muted motions that trailed after-image ghosts. Myde watched the fluid line of his back as Ienzo crossed the room and bent to pick up a sharpie. In neat, even letters, he wrote on the wall:

**VI**

**IX**

And then, beside the roman numerals, he added:

**Zexion**

**Demyx**

…_have you… remembered… your name is…_

_That's Zexion, right?_

_Lord Demyx, Lord Demyx, Lord Demyx!_

A scalpel sharp chill lanced through Myde's skull, but before he could stop Ienzo, the efficient black marker continued:

**VI – Zexion – Ienzo**

**IX – Demyx – Myde**

Aquamarine eyes swept the letters over and over again, but he refused to let himself think them through. Half of him was screaming _you are, you are_ and the other half tried desperately to stifle the voice, the very idea.

Only morbid curiosity was keeping Myde in the room now. Only the horrifying sense of wonder that was flowing through him kept Myde from screaming, from calling Ienzo crazy, calling all this crazy, a nightmare or an illusion.

But he couldn't deny the monsters—Dancers?—and Ienzo knew things Myde had only heard in his head. It was like watching a train leap the tracks: in seconds, his world was becoming a screeching wreck. Or maybe it wasn't that his world was tearing up now, but that it'd been falling apart bit by bit for a long time and this morning monsters and memories had ripped it wide open.

And he'd been left with just Ienzo to help pick up the pieces. What a comforting thought.

Then Ienzo was speaking in a teacher's voice, exasperated and impatient. "Zexion and Demyx—" there was a moment's hesitation before he added "—you and I—used to work side-by-side as members of Organization XIII, a group of thirteen extremely powerful Nobodies who aimed to become whole… by any means necessary." Ienzo stilled, held his gaze unmoving on the wall. "The creatures that followed you today were the Dancers, a form of lesser Nobody."

"Nobodies… lesser Nobodies… I don't even know what a Nobody is!" Myde didn't remember climbing to his feet, but now he was standing, staring down at the tattered tops of his Converse. "You're confusing me!" And he didn't mean to yell but he just wanted answers, he just wanted something—_something_ to make sense. He was so sick of not knowing and being stuck in this place halfway to nowhere.

"A Nobody is… nothingness." Ienzo's white-clad shoulders tensed. "It is the creature left behind when a whole being loses its heart."

Myde knew this was insane, knew that none of this made sense, knew that people couldn't lose their hearts and live, but…

…_all he really felt was hollow._

His brain pounded beneath his temples, an unrelenting revolt against everything he was hearing. "How does…" Myde watched the toe of one Converse scruff the thin black line where white tile met white tile. "How does someone… live without a heart?"

Ienzo shook his head; Myde watched the odd-colored strands of hair catch on starched white cotton. "Their metaphorical hearts. The organ itself isn't stolen—only its metaphysical connotations."

After a half second's pause, Ienzo backtracked to explain, like he thought Myde wouldn't know what metaphysical meant. "Everything that romantics attribute to their hearts—emotions, guidance, morality—Nobodies do not have. They are simply the leftover minds and bodies of Others.

"If you had a strong heart before becoming a Nobody—" Ienzo left a pointed pause, "—you keep your original form, with only minute changes in appearance.

"The greatest changes come to the personality: without a heart—a conscience, some might call it—the body does not think or even act the way it did when it had a heart. That hollow shell can distinguish differences between itself and who it used to be; it comes to perceive itself as an individual. The result is a person who was never born, never acknowledged by the world, connected to neither light nor darkness. A nothing—a Nobody."

Only because Ienzo now held his full attention was Myde able to recognize the tremor that slid through the other boy, the barest waver in that cold and measured voice.

"And even though Nobodies cannot feel, the sensation of hollowness never leaves."

Myde knew. The air in the violet room did not move; the golden morning light did not stir where it lay across the walls. Every nerve in Myde's body seemed to have rotted under his skin, stripping his senses to nothing. The black words on the wall swam in front of his eyes. Demyx. Zexion. Myde. Ienzo. Blue-steel and bleach-white bled out and into focus.

Ienzo turned away from the wall at last to catch and hold Myde's eyes with his own; the room was so still Myde thought he could hear the brush of blue eyelashes against the other boy's cheeks.

"That non-existence is the true nature of Nobodies," Ienzo murmured. "It was a nature that we once fought as members of Organization XIII. We aimed to retrieve our lost hearts. We wanted to be whole.

"Even independent of their Others, Nobodies will not—cannot—erase their connections to reality. We claimed to be different creatures, but we clung to our memories, our appearances, and even our names. Zexion and Demyx are just anagrams of Ienzo and Myde, with—"

_There's no X in Ienzo._

"X's added," Myde muttered, and Ienzo didn't even need to nod for the intern to know he was right. Demyx was just Myde with an X. And Ienzo said that Demyx had existed, had been part of some organization which was made up of people without hearts.

Demyx didn't have a heart. Demyx was just Myde with an X.

"I just… I just don't get it!" Myde couldn't listen quietly anymore. Ienzo acted like he knew everything, but even if this Organization and those Nobody things did exist, and even if the name Demyx looked just like Myde, how could he possibly be both? He'd never been a part of any organization, and he didn't remember ever—

_Would you like to know your purpose… Demyx?_

_You possess great strength, and yet are lacking. A heart… Seek your heart alongside us._

_Welcome to the Organization, Number Nine._

"I'm—I'm Myde! How could I be Demyx too?"

Pregnant silence filled the dim hospital room. When Ienzo spoke at last, it was clipped, as if he was crushing a waver from his voice. "Do you understand the concept of rebirth?" He didn't wait for an answer. "The Organization's operations at Castle Oblivion fell apart and Zexion—" he stopped suddenly, inhaled sharply "—I was murdered. Obviously, judging by your presence here, the Organization faired no better after Castle Oblivion."

Myde was lost; instead of making the leaps of logic, his head had fallen through the gaps. Ienzo wasn't saying…

"In order for you to be here, that Demyx must necessarily be dead. I had thought that the final fate of Nobodies was to fade away completely, yet…" he looked away, "you're… we're here—no more whole than before."

The roof, the sky, the world itself fell down on him, dropped Myde to his knees. Ice cold tiles pounded against the blood congealed over his scrapes, a pain so distant that it felt like it was happening to someone else. A whirlwind of voices shrieked; Myde was sure his ear drums would burst. Black spots swam in front of his eyes. _No, no, please no, please…_

_Lord Demyx!_

…_took a moment to remember how to feel…_

…_the voice of the dark place whispering…_

…_It's been a long time, Demyx…_

…_lacking a heart…_

No more whole than before.

Cold sweat ran in the hollows below his eyes, stuck his blond bangs to his temples. It didn't make sense but God it made more sense than nothing, it was nothing and everything fit it and it was crazy but everything was crazy now and Myde could feel (couldn't feel) it all tumbling around in the hollow places under his ribs, so it was true—or no, couldn't be, anything but this, dreaming, nightmare, it couldn't be, couldn't mean that he was, had always been—

Myde's mind shut down.

Black words on the violet wall shook, shuddered, crawled, and suddenly in the room the shadows shifted, threaded over them both, over Ienzo, made him… a ghost in black leather and soft dull silver, hidden away by the interlocking teeth of a double-mouthed zipper; the smooth, wide toes of dark boots; a fall of blue-silver hair. A single, wavering cobalt eye grew hollow and measuring—in such a Zexion way.

And when Myde could no longer hold that (person's?) gaze, he turned his eyes to the floor, where the bone white tile met the pale illusion of black leather gloves that settled like a second skin over his trembling hands.

There were words spilling off Myde's tongue then, in his voice, but that he'd never formed, never meant to say. "_We're…_ Nobodies?"

Ienzo shattered like a pane of glass. "Yes."

Ienzo had always seemed so sure of himself, so controlled, and so untouchable, but the shadows had fled and left… someone else in his place, someone Myde didn't know: a wraith all in white with slender wrists and stained fingertips and just too fragile to be who he claimed they were. And suddenly Ienzo's full cobalt stare seemed a little desperate, a little like _please believe me_.

"Our being here… is not some fresh start for our souls. We were reborn, but we are not a new beginning for the Myde and Ienzo of so long ago. Our Others' appearances, our names came back… but inside—maybe even in our memories—we're no different from Zexion and Demyx," Ienzo murmured. "We still don't have our hearts."

The world flashed grey, and Myde lost all control of himself.

He felt the pull of scabs and muscles as something—someone—inside him made him leap up, throw his body across the room. He felt the sickening _crack_ as Ienzo's head hit the cold violet wall, felt the marker-stained hands shoving at his arms in an attempt to break free. Myde heard the angry inhalation as his fingernails dug deep into Ienzo's shoulders.

This wasn't him and he couldn't stop his hands pressing painfully tight into Ienzo's skin, couldn't stop the fear (of what?) running icy fingers over the nape of his neck, into his heart where it pounded against Ienzo as he held the shorter boy prisoner.

Whoever had control of him lowered Myde's face until he was a bare inch from Ienzo's, startled and furious cobalt flashing into aqua. From somewhere deep inside Myde came a voice dripping with darkness.

"We _do_ have hearts."

_Please stop it please stop it this isn't me Demyxpleasestopit! _

"We do too have hearts," drawled the voice that was Myde's and not Myde's. Then—"I won't lose everything again."

Ienzo's shuddering breath—a medley of anxiousness and relief and fear and so many other things that Myde couldn't name (_our hearts are still missing_) and Ienzo would deny (_our hearts are still missing_)—was warm where it brushed Myde's cheek. Ienzo had ceased trying to escape when Myde started talking, and now his hands were fisted in the scratchy material of the blond's scrub, effectively trapped between them.

There were three or so seconds of agonizing silence, and then Myde realized that all this was getting very awkward, very fast.

He barely knew Ienzo and even if they _had_ been comrades, that did not make shoving the other Nobody up against a wall and getting in his face any sort of socially acceptable. _Pleaseeee…_ Myde whined in his head, _can I have my body back now?_

Very suddenly, he was in control of himself again. The blond jerked his hands off Ienzo's shoulders lightning fast and tripped as he tried to move away. Grimacing, Ienzo lifted one freed hand to massage the back of his head, where—Myde cringed—there was sure to be a bump later. He had slammed him up against the wall pretty hard…

"Oh my God, I'm sorry!" the intern wailed, and just as quickly as he'd scurried away from Ienzo, he scurried back, arms flailing about as if he had absolutely no idea what to do with them. "Are you okay? ARE YOU BLEEDING?"

"I think my eardrums may be bleeding," Ienzo muttered. Of course, with Myde quickly approaching a state near to guilt-induced panic, the only word the blond caught was "bleeding".

"GAH!" Myde stopped flailing only long enough to grab Ienzo's head and, tugging none-too-gently, poked and prodded until he was sure the abused boy's skull hadn't been split.

"Let go of me!" Ienzo hissed, somewhat muffled from having his face unceremoniously thrown into Myde's scrub. "You smell like motor oil!"

"That's Flounder's fault," the blond answered without thinking, and then—"No! Don't breathe motor oil fumes!"

Myde abruptly dropped Ienzo (whose expression, by the second, was growing more murderous) and started frantically pacing in a way that reminded Ienzo strongly of a rabbit Zexion had once run across in Wonderland. "Are you feeling nauseous? Dizzy? Tired?" Myde interrogated. "What if you have a concussion? You could go into a _coma_! WE HAVE TO GET YOU TO A HOSPITAL!"

"…We're in a hospital."

"Oh," the intern blinked, "right..."

The beat of blessed silence that followed was broken almost immediately by: "Hospital or not, comas are _bad_! Don't take a coma!" Then a look of solemn alarm swept across Myde's face as he stared at Ienzo, and for a second the blue-haired boy was almost concerned.

"I… I…" Myde whimpered. "I can't remember how to cure comas! That was totally in my textbook, I know it!"

Ienzo seriously contemplated beating his head against the wall again, if only on the off chance that it might render him unconscious. Myde was the only indication of his reality (non-reality?) and the only true confidant he could have in this shut-in world… but damn it if the blond wasn't absolutely nerve-wracking.

"—and you'll need to drink a gallon of water an hour, and you shouldn't sleep for the next ten days, and—"

"Myde, please shut up…"

"—and if you start to have hallucinations, you should definitely see a doctor right away! Oh... but that's kinda what you're here for already, isn't it? So make sure they know that these hallucinations are different from your usual hallucinations, because if they ignore it, you could go into a—"

"Shut up!" Ienzo hadn't yelled in years, and he had forgotten how cathartic it could be. Myde stopped flitting around instantaneously, his face coloring with embarrassment.

Reining his voice in, Ienzo tried to sound slightly less irritated. "I don't have a concussion. I'm not going to go into a coma."

"I'm sorry," the intern muttered, scuffing one raggedy Converse against the other. "Are you really okay?"

"I never was."

_They call this place The World that Never Was—_

_Well that's a stupid name!_

"Sorry," Myde mumbled for what felt like the millionth time. He chewed on his bottom lip and twiddled his fingers thoughtlessly. Now, when his heart raced with nervous guilt, the detachment, the other self that had revolted against Ienzo's words seemed impossible, and Myde wondered if he hadn't just imagined losing control of his own body as some sort of subconscious excuse to rough up his patient.

_Oh noooo… _Myde groaned to himself. _I'm so gonna get fired for this. _"Um, um…" he stuttered, "I really didn't mean to hurt you so if you could, you know, not tell anybody about that that'd really cool 'cause I don't wanna lose this job and… yeah…" A rip in the knee of his navy scrub suddenly became more intriguing than anything else in the world.

Neither of them moved; no rustle of starched hospital fabric disturbed the seconds of sudden quiet.

Then Ienzo was shaking his head, and the barest quirk of the pale boy's mouth looked almost like amusement. "You haven't changed at all."

And Ienzo was wrong, but he was right too, so Myde said nothing in reply.

It was at that moment that both boys caught the sound of high heels clattering down the hall outside. A shadow flickered under the door only seconds before the lock's red light flashed green and Aerith flew into the room, an impossible mix of girlish grace and anxious abandon.

"M-Myde! You're… here." Green eyes flickered over the tears in his scrub and over the red-brown dry blood. "You're hurt!" Whatever rebuke she had been ready to give him vanished under her natural tendency to mother, and quick as she could cross the room, the brunette was inspecting his injuries with a critical gaze.

"Belle said you had an accident this morning," Aerith murmured, almost scolding but still too sweet to shame. "It's dangerous to let injuries go without treatment—for you and the other patients. The hospital is supposed to be a sterile environment. You didn't even bother to get bandages."

Myde shifted nervously away from her hands. "I…ermm…"

"He was late and decided to get right to morning greetings," Ienzo interrupted, smooth as shadow and cool as shade. "I delayed him for a few extra minutes." He offered his psychiatrist a half-contemptuous lifting of his lips that was more sneer than smile.

For a long moment Aerith stared at her patient, wavering between apprehension and a look Myde could not name. Some invisible current swum through the air; a conversation went on between Ienzo and his doctor that Myde could not hear or understand. And then at last, Aerith looked away, biting her bottom lip and blinking too many times.

"Myde, the nurses need you to help pass out medicine this morning."

"Huh?" Myde shifted nervously. "But I'm supposed to—"

"You're supposed to do what I ask you to." There wasn't an angry sound to her voice, but Myde felt like retreating anyway—it was more than clear that Aerith was saying "what I say" and meaning "what I order".

"Oh... O-Okay..." Myde stumbled. Yesterday Aerith had explained her schedule to him precisely. After morning greetings, which he was supposed to have just finished, she had counseling with some of her patients—observation that Aerith herself had said was exceptionally important to his internship. "So I'm not observing the morning sessions?"

"I'd prefer to work alone today." Aerith didn't look at him as she spoke, even when she took hold of his elbow and pulled him toward the door. "We need to get your injury looked at Myde," she said in a surprisingly firm voice. "Come on."

After a moment's hesitation, the blond let himself be led toward the hall, aqua gaze switching between the brunette's tense form and the steady glint of Ienzo's stare. He and Aerith were nearly out the door when Ienzo's voice, laced with no little amount of irony, stilled them.

"By the way Demyx… good morning."

"Hey! I didn't say you could call me that!" Myde whined back over his shoulder—missing entirely the look of dread that flashed in Aerith's eyes.

And then the navy door clicked shut behind him and the white tile blended into blue under his gaze. The lock spat out its hermetic hiss, and Myde felt things clicking shut—clicking open—inside him.

How much did he believe Ienzo? Could he _not_ believe Ienzo? Myde didn't want to be… a Nobody. He didn't want to be followed by monsters, or hear memories that didn't belong to him. He didn't want any of it to be true.

But if it had to be true… if things like that were going to keep happening… Myde was glad there was someone to explain. At least now he knew a little—at least now he had someone to turn to when these things he couldn't handle happened.

At least now he wasn't alone.

The hallway stretched on, dark and endless as the pool of questions swirling in the back of his head. Ienzo had given him so few answers, had hinted at so many things... Stories of Nobodies and hearts and organizations raced from one side of his mind to the other, changing, growing, beckoning…

The intern smiled.

Somehow, even though he knew things would never be the same, even though he had more questions now than when he had entered the violet room, Myde couldn't help but feel… lighter.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Another day done," Myde sighed, poking dejectedly at the torn metal end where _Flounder's_ mirror had once proudly sat. _Flounder_ creaked ominously and listed a little further to the left. There was no way, Myde thought, that his poor moped was making it home at anything close to the minimum speed limit.

In an attempt to be consoling—to Flounder or to himself, even Myde wasn't sure—Myde patted the moped's battered handlebar gently.

"I know your pain old buddy."

Wary of crumpling the already precariously held together frame, Myde slid on to Flounder's duct-taped seat. With all the anxiety of a bomb squad out on call, Myde turned the key. Flounder gave a valiant effort, motor straining to its highest whine.

The engine sputtered out three times before it sluggishly caught and puttered into something resembling life. It would have to do. Keeping an eye open for ambulances—he was not about to be the hospital's next martyr—Myde chugged out of Rufus Memorial's parking lot and into the congested streets of Dawn City.

Unlike this morning, the roads and sidewalks were bustling with shoppers and businesspeople alike. Myde cringed when he came across a gouge and dark tire tracks in the road. Shards of glass from Flounder's now missing mirror still littered the asphalt.

Flounder motored on through the evening sunlight toward Aurora Heights.

Myde felt too light. He had filtered through the day like he was all soul and no body—a solid that'd skipped liquid phase and gone straight to being a gas, to being a bunch of disconnected particles bouncing around. There was nothing holding him together.

Myde wondered how he was supposed to react to the knowledge that he wasn't quite human. He was pretty sure there should be histrionics involved, and sulking and shock too probably, but… he couldn't quite bring himself to worry. It felt like he'd been told he had polio—_it won't kill you, but sorry kid, you'll never be the same_.

What could he do? He couldn't change things he had no control over. He couldn't change anything.

Flounder coughed and kicked suspiciously, and Myde cut the speed again. The poor moped wasn't going to get away from this scot-free. It needed some serious work. Pushing gingerly on the brake, Myde eased the moped to a stop outside the gates of his community and punched in the gate pass.

All day he had thought about lying to himself. He thought about chalking it all up to some contagious brain flu or Ienzo's freakish persuasiveness. But denial wasn't part of his personality (that heart thing Did Not Count). Myde wasn't a liar by nature, and it was kind of hard to pretend when he still had the scrapes from being swamped by monsters. Erm, lesser Nobodies.

Myde drifted, not quite sure how to act. Shouldn't things be different? He was… a Nobody. There was a part of him that was someone else. But still, even after all that, he just felt like Myde—Myde with more problems than normal, but Myde nonetheless.

He puttered through the perfectly swept streets toward his house.

What would happen if he didn't do anything? If he just let the memories in his head talk? If he just listened to Ienzo? What else was he supposed to do?

Myde clicked the garage door shut behind _Flounder_ and went into his house the way his mother told him not to.

More than once that day, Myde had wished there was some sort of handbook to being a Nobody. Nothing was ever that easy—except that it sort of _was_ that easy, because Ienzo was writing one! _The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being a Nobody—manuscript in drywall format._ Myde chuckled.

But his laughter died quickly. Ienzo… thoughts of the other Nobody left Myde with a disquieting rattle inside—not because he was terrified of him; Myde had gotten over that when he'd decided Rufus Memorial wasn't really to blame for all this Demyx business. No, what bothered Myde most about Ienzo was that Aerith had kept them apart all day.

On his first day at Rufus Memorial, Aerith said that he'd be working closely with Ienzo, but as it stood, Myde had barely seen the other boy at all. The first day had been his own fault, sure… but today?

Ienzo wouldn't have refused to sign the confidentiality waiver, Myde was fairly certain of that—so why had Aerith suddenly asked Myde to go help distribute medicine? The nurses had been as confused as he was, and they hadn't needed any help at all. And then at lunch too…

What was Aerith afraid of? Myde got the feeling he knew—and that it was already too late.

If that didn't sound ominous, Myde didn't know what did. Ugh! Things really weren't like that, and Myde didn't plan on going crazy (any crazier, at least). He wasn't about to snap and try to kill someone!

_But Ienzo did_, said that nasty voice in the back of Myde's head. _And Aerith thinks you'll go the same way._

She didn't deserve the extra stress of worrying about him too—but then he was back at that whole _can't change anything_ thing. He couldn't just go back to ignoring Ienzo, not after all this. And he couldn't even reassure Aerith, because no matter what he'd say, it would sound crazy. Still, he couldn't just ignore her, because then she'd keep him away from Ienzo…

It made Myde's brain hurt. He had done more thinking in the past two days than he had in the last _year_, and there was a nice migraine beating at his temples to prove it. He didn't want to think anymore—he just wanted to find the most mindless activity he could and do that until he fell asleep.

Unfortunately, playing the guitar was out. He did not want a repeat of yesterday, no way. And that left only one alternative…

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Evening sunlight, warm and dying, spilled through the window of the blond's bedroom and heated a scrub-clad back. A dull ringing from downstairs startled Myde—the phone was almost off the hook when his mother was home, but she hadn't come back from work yet and anybody who was anyone would have known that. Shrugging, he turned back to his computer.

The phone rang twice more then cut off suddenly. _Telemarketers don't give up that easily…_ Myde thought.

There was a creaking of soft feet on the stairs and then a quiet knock on his doorframe. Their housekeeper's ebony bob and snow white face peeked around the door. "The phone's for you Myde," she said in her achingly high and sweet voice.

"Oh."

The housekeeper stepped gingerly over some discarded jeans (_tsk_-ing to herself and vowing that she'd get the boy to clean his room yet) and handed him the portable phone. "It's your darling friend Yuffie."

"Thanks Ms. White," Myde said, pointedly ignoring the loud _Okay, talk to _me _now!_ filtering out of the telephone.

The dainty housekeeper was nearly out the door before she turned around. "Oh! Myde, your mother said she'd be home late today. Gee, she's always working so hard. You let me know when you get hungry for supper, all right?"

Myde nodded, lifting the phone to his ear as the housekeeper swept out of his room. "Um… Hey Yuffie."

"Myyyyyydeeee! It's been forever since we talked!" He thought the girl was a little hyper in person, but on the phone, she felt the need to double the volume of her voice, as if the message wouldn't reach him otherwise.

"We talked on Sunday…"

"Yeah, that's _forever_ ago!"

"Yuffie, it's Tuesday," he offered uncertainly. It suddenly caught up with him exactly how much had gone on in his two days at Rufus Memorial. Two days ago, he had never heard of Demyx or Nobodies or… He shoved the thoughts away. There was no use thinking about those without Ienzo around—Myde would just run himself in circles and get confused and never find his way out.

"Myde!" Yuffie's howl was tinny through the through the phone. "You better not've hung up on me!"

The blond squawked. "I'm here, I'm here!"

"Not all, obviously," Yuffie snickered.

"Hey!"

"Anyway, what're you doin' right now?"

"Ummm…" He cast around for a plausible lie and came up empty. _Ugh…_ "I'm… Imfeedinmahneopez." Whoever said the truth will set you free was a dirty, dirty liar.

"Wanna say that one again in normal-people speak?"

Myde was more than grateful that Yuffie wasn't around to see his face turning a lovely shade of tomato. "…I'm feeding my Neopets." Myde had to jerk the phone away from his ear and hold it at arm's length until Yuffie's crowing laughter died to a level below glass-shattering. "Hey, you played it too!"

"_Played_ it, play_ed_."

"Shut up," Myde pouted, rebelliously mouse-clicking to stuff his faerie Peophin with omelet. "You just called to tease me."

"Well I _had_ a reason, but teasing you is just so easy…"

"Yuffie, why did you really call?" Sometimes the girl got so caught up in messing with people that she forgot her original reason for hunting them down to begin with. Myde was just looking out for the intelligence of their conversation by segueing her abruptly into the main topic. Really, that was it—it wasn't like he hated being teased or anything…

Yuffie sighed, a rattling sound through the phone's speaker, and most of the banter leaked out of her voice. It was replaced by a slowly mounting excitement that made Myde think of wiggly puppy dogs.

"Vinnie's doing a reading tonight and I totally think we should all be there to cheer for him. Cloud and Leon already said they'd come and you should totally come too or I'll be really bored, because I seriously think Cloud and Leon can have entire conversations made out of dot-dot-dot and I don't know about you, but that gets really old really fast. Anyway, you're coming so you better get ready right now because I don't want to miss any of Vinnie's story."

All this she said in rapid fire. If Myde hadn't known her so long, it probably wouldn't have made a word of sense to him. As it stood, there seemed to be one or two important details missing from her explanation.

"Um, how are we supposed to get to the reading Yuffie?"

"Uh, you're gonna come pick me up?"

"Flounder can't hold two people." He conveniently left out the fact that, as of now, _Flounder_ couldn't hold even one person—a call to Highwind Repairs seemed imminent.

"We can't take the Gale?" Yuffie caught his attention again, asking as if that had been the obvious plan from the very beginning.

"Mom's not home."

"Aw man… Leon said he's gonna walk and Cloud can't fit three people on Fenrir…"

"How about um… you go with Cloud and I'll find a way to get there on my own?"

Yuffie made a skeptical hum. "You promise to show up? _Promise_?"

Something about this didn't sit right with Myde, but he couldn't put his finger on just what. Why was Yuffie so intent on making sure he'd come? Myde wasn't the type to flake out on purpose. "Why wouldn't I come?"

"Good!" Yuffie didn't answer his question. "See yah in a bit!"

"Yuffie, wait a second! You didn't even tell me where the reading was."

In the long seconds of silence that followed, Myde felt something cold uncoiling in the pit of his stomach.

Yuffie stumbled over her words. "Why don't you… uh… just meet me and Cloud at Marino's on 3rd?"

"Yuffie," Myde's voice gained a hard edge, "where is the reading?" But he knew; he knew just because she wouldn't tell him, just because she'd wanted him to promise…

"The Cerulean," she muttered at last.

"I'm not going."

"You said you would!" Yuffie was caught somewhere between yelling and whining.

"I'm not going there. I told you before." He didn't know whether to be hurt or angry, why she would think he'd made an exception just for Vincent, or who Yuffie thought she was, trying to trick him into agreeing—

"Myde, he won't be there."

"He's always there," Myde managed through gritted teeth. "If I'm there, he'll be there—that's just how it is."

"One time Myde—it was one time! And that was when you went _looking_ for him."

He fought the sudden urge to hang up without another word. "I can't go to the Cerulean."

"Comeeeee on! There's gonna be like a thousand people there. What're the chances that you two end up in the same place at the same time? We'll be in the basement anyway! There's no way you'll run into him."

Yuffie didn't understand just how much fate hated Myde Cistern.

"Yuffie I just can't, especially not today…"

There was a long pause, thick with discontent. Then Yuffie spoke again, suddenly, painfully solemn. "When are you going to realize that the only person you have to answer to is yourself?"

The phone clicked and went dead in his ears.

_When are you going to realize that the only person you have to answer to is yourself?_

_When I find some answers to give, _thought Myde.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Under the gold and navy sky, Myde scuffed down the sidewalk outside his house, counting concrete squares beneath his shoes. The streetlights that lined Aurora Heights' boulevards came on without a flicker, but Myde hardly noticed. He was too busy modifying the analogy he'd made about his life that morning.

_My life is not a train wreck._ The blond ran one foot along the perfectly edged end of a neighbor's lawn. _My life is a 747 crashing into a suburb._

Why was he doing this? Why was he going, after how many times he'd told Yuffie no? Why was he going when he knew exactly who he would see?

Myde blamed it on Ienzo. Ienzo's stories and Ienzo's ideas made him reckless, like some part of him really believed they didn't have hearts and so there was no way this would hurt—but it would, Myde knew.

So _why_ was he here? He didn't have to be at the gates of his community, punching in numbers on the gilt pad and slipping out the pedestrian exit. He didn't have to scuffing his good shoes on the old, cracked sidewalk on the public street. He didn't have to be crossing the last hundred meters between Aurora Heights entrance and the nearest bus stop.

Myde didn't have an explanation. He was just going.

He slumped down on the sticky, unwashed plastic bench at the stop. Not for the first time, Myde wondered if he wasn't a little masochistic, if he didn't _like_ getting himself in trouble. If that was part of his nature, Myde sighed, someone up there should have had the brains to make him stronger. He wasn't cut out for this.

The bus, three minutes late, creaked to a stop in front of him. Its automatic door folded, scraped unpleasantly against the stairs, and spilled overly cooled air onto the blond's face. Pointedly ignoring the bus driver eyeing his bridge coat and dress slacks, Myde fed his dollar into the meter and shuffled toward the back of the bus.

The bus smelt faintly of unwashed bodies and sunflower seeds, though it was nearly empty of both. A little old woman, absorbed in a trade paperback, sat in the handicapped section and didn't look up when Myde passed. The only other passenger on the bus was a middle-aged man in a business suit who turned the touch dial on his iPod and nodded politely to Myde. The blond clumped up the stair to the empty back seats and threw himself down onto the plastic bench.

Myde slid over to the window, cringing a little as the bus's halogen lights caught patterns of grease and fingerprints all over the glass's dark surface. He was almost tempted to lay his head on the window anyway. Almost. Idly, he tucked a hand into his pocket and traced the cracks running over the back of his cell phone. He'd stepped on it once or twice, but it still worked all right. All the numbers in the phone had been programmed by his mother, who'd made him prove he had them memorized—just in case of emergency. Or if, in the case of tonight, the inevitable decided to happen.

The dull hum of the air conditioner and the engine were the only sounds to upset the heavy silence in the bus, and Myde wasn't sure whether or not he'd prefer it noisy. He wished he'd thought to bring his CD player. It'd be easier to ignore his thoughts if he had the cool words of _Kingdom Come_ to distract him, or the business man's headphones leaked music, or if the little old lady would just had a coughing fit.

The bus stayed silent, and Myde watched himself where halogen glare turned the dark window into a mirror.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde couldn't have missed his stop if he'd fallen asleep with headphones on. There was some innate sliver of him that was constantly, cruelly tuned into the hum of 9th street. It was a presence so far in the back of his head that Nobody whispers could drown it out—but not get rid of it. Now, so close to that place, his entire body buzzed with stupid terror. The bus ground to a halt. His hand trembled on the yellow "door open" strip, and Myde could feel the hairs on the backs of his arms standing on end. He was pretty sure all the shivering he was doing wasn't from the bus's air conditioning.

Myde stepped off the bus—and stumbled into the backs of a group of teenage girls in dresses that covered only just enough to be called formal.

"Hey," scoffed the brunette with just a little too much eye shadow, "don't push."

"Yeah!" chimed her even more eye shadowed friend. "It's not gonna make the line move faster!"

_The line? _Myde realized almost instantaneously that he'd gotten off the bus and joined the line for the Cerulean—whose front doors were more than two blocks from the bus stop. "Umm… sorry," Myde muttered and stepped out of the queue which was hurriedly growing behind him.

Ignoring both the angry stares of the people in line and the looming blue-lit skyscraper ahead, Myde wandered along the curb. He couldn't see Yuffie anywhere in the long crowd of people. _If she didn't come after all this…_

The blond was nearly to the head of the line—not looking at the doors, nope nope—when a very familiar voice shouted.

"MMYYYYDEEEE!" There was some short girl in a black and sage qipao waving frantically at him.

Myde did a double-take. Yuffie in a _way_ too short black and sage qipao was waving at him. In an effort to save some of the girl's modesty, the brunet man behind her pulled her arm down, preventing her from jumping around. It took Myde another two seconds to realize the savior of Yuffie's dignity was actually Leon. And then Myde laughed.

Leon had forgone his usual leather and fur for a tie. The look really wasn't working for him, but Myde didn't have the heart to say so.

"Thank gawd you came!" Yuffie griped. "If I had to stand two more minutes with these stiffs, I think I'da up and died."

"Thanks a lot." Another familiar voice: Myde realized belatedly that the guy standing in front of Leon in line was actually Cloud. Myde didn't know how he'd missed him—there was no mistaking that spiky hair. It must have been the blue clothes that threw him off.

Cloud had always struck Myde as the somber type of person strangers really wanted to approach but didn't have the guts to. You either knew him from birth or you never knew him at all. More often than not, Myde felt like he was in the "never knew him" category. It didn't help that Cloud's penchant for black and silver (apparently inherited from an old companion whose name was _never_ mentioned) made him look even more severe and unwelcoming. That was probably why it was so surprising to see Cloud in that sleeveless blue turtleneck, clingy as Yuffie's qipao.

He looked good, and Myde indulged mild jealousy because it made him forget where he was. Cloud always looked too good to be hanging out with weirdoes like Yuffie and, well, himself—Myde was pretty sure the only reason Cloud wasn't a model was because he liked working on motorcycles as much as he liked riding them.

Yuffie said it was terrible waste of man-pretty; Myde just wanted to know who cut Cloud's hair.

"Blehhh!" A foot or so over, Yuffie was making faces at Leon, whose look screamed _not amused_. "Myde!" the girl bounced over to him. "You think my dress is fine, right? Fashionista Squall says its 'indecent'." She made air quotes for emphasis. Then, a horribly mischievous look swept on her face, and she stood on tip-toe to stage whisper in Myde's ear: "I bet he's just jealous that, for once, people are looking at me instead of his ass. He's probably not used to eyes being anywhere else."

"Y-Yuffie!" If she was aiming to traumatize the poor intern before the end of the night, she was on the right track.

"No, it's not that," Cloud said, and his voice was so absolutely flat and normal that it took Myde at least a minute to realize the spiky blond was teasing too. "That dress is just giving Leon flashbacks to Don Corneo."

Yuffie rolled. Yuffie laughed so hard she burst a few stitches in her dress, and possibly a rib or two as well. "Ooh!" she squeaked out. "The tiara! The tiara!" Even Cloud was smiling now.

Myde just felt out of the loop. He hadn't been friends with Cloud or Leon all that long, and sometimes they brought up events he'd never been there for. This in-joke, however, Myde was glad he'd missed. By the twitching going on with Leon's right eye and the words "dress" and "Don Corneo"—who everybody knew was the sleaziest businessman this side of Sunrise Boulevard—Myde could already tell there was a story there that was best left unsaid.

Sure enough, Leon pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. "We agreed not to talk about that. Ever again."

"Correction—" Yuffie smirked "—you n' Cloud agreed not to talk about it ever again. Me on the other hand… I'll be telling my _grandkids_ all about it." She turned her chocolate eyes on Myde again. "Do _you_ wanna hear about it?"

Leon growled, but it was the way Cloud paled that was really surprising.

"Er… Yuffie, didn't you say something about getting into the show early?" the spiky blond murmured.

The best thing about Yuffie was that unless she was on the trail of something shiny or expensive, she was exceptionally easy to distract—a fact that Cloud exploited with only a hint of relief.

"Ooh yeah! We were just waiting for you, slowpoke." Yuffie poked one of the gold buttons on Myde's coat to make sure her point got across. "The guy at the door said we couldn't get in unless we had our 'complete party'. And you know what I said?"

"Yuffie…" Leon was not as adept at distraction as Cloud, obviously.

"I said _Mister, I'm a party _all on my own_!_"

Leon's voice managed to carry over her and still somehow stay completely disinterested. "If we wait any longer, we'll be getting in with the rest of the line."

Myde didn't have the time to ask how Yuffie knew he'd come after all that fuss on the phone, because she was already off, sprinting past more than few people who looked ready to mutiny against the Cerulean bouncers. True to fashion, the boys were left to trail behind her, and Myde fell in behind Cloud.

It was only because the intern was so intent on not thinking about where they were going and how much he did not want to go inside that he noticed it—when Cloud stretched out a hand to try and catch the back of Yuffie's dress (and stop her from running off without them), Myde noticed a sliver of black ink stretching out over Cloud's half-bare shoulder and under the line of his turtleneck.

Myde had only seen it once before—the devil's wing tattoo that covered half of Cloud's upper-back—and he didn't need to see it more than once to know that it must have been agony to get. All that solid black…

He didn't know the whole story, but Myde was pretty sure the wing was another souvenir from that guy they never named.

By this time, Yuffie was already racing back to them, waving excitedly toward the bouncer who, despite eyeing them with general suspicion, was opening the Cerulean's front door. To Myde, the entrance couldn't have looked anymore like the gates of hell.

Over the angry screeches of people still waiting in line, he asked Yuffie, "How'd you do that?"

"I'm just ninja that way," was the girl's smug reply.

"Vincent got us VIP tickets."

"Way to kill my fun Leon!" Yuffie griped at their brunet companion, whose grimace had less to do with the fact that he had just "killed her fun" and more to do with way she was effectively disturbing the peace.

Then they were being swept through the gates of hell—Myde held his breath like he'd never take another—and passing through security. Those invasive hand-held metal detectors pinged on all his gold buttons and on both his and Cloud's cell phones, but the hold up was short—too short—and before he knew it, they were being ushered to their table by a prim and pressed attendant.

Cerulean was… well, if it hadn't been the place that Myde never wanted to set foot in, it would have been the place he really wanted to set foot in. Even to him that didn't make much sense. Myde was quickly realizing that not everything made sense in this world. And really, the Cerulean just had that affect on people. You either wanted in, or you were in.

If Dawn City was the entertainment capital of the world, Cerulean was the capitol building. While other venues displayed the latest trends or the hottest music, the Cerulean's stage was where art was born. There were no fashion trends in Dawn City that did not start on Cerulean's runway; there was no best-selling author who hadn't read on the blue-lit stage.

Part nightclub and part art gallery, the Cerulean had all the glint and glitter of an endless red-carpet event—and a ticket price to match. Myde had been so caught up in saying no over the phone, he hadn't even thought about how the heck Yuffie could have up and afforded four tickets.

Once upon a time, _Destati_ magazine had given his mother a VIP pass to the Cerulean, supposedly good for lifetime use. It made sense for the chief editor of the city's most read magazine to be VIP at the city's most prestigious club. But Myde's mother had very quietly called him into the kitchen and made him sit there silently while she cut the shining card into thousand dollar confetti.

At the time, Myde was sure his mother had gone crazy. He had dreamed of playing on the Cerulean's stage from the moment he'd picked up a guitar, and his mother was just _shredding_ their golden ticket?

Myde remembered being angry. He's stopped speaking to her for a whole three days—the longest grudge he'd ever held. What made him most angry was that she hadn't gave him a reason.

Eight years later, slumped against the blue-velvet back of his chair and plucking nervously at the embroidery on the edge of their tablecloth, Myde wished he'd never learned the real reason. It had cut through his dreams as irrevocably as his mother's scissors.

Vague anger—at Yuffie, at Vincent, at _him_—welled up inside Myde, and he peeled his hand from the tablecloth for fear of ripping it. It wasn't fair to think that Vincent was selling out by reading at the Cerulean; Myde hadn't told anyone but Yuffie, and reading here was probably a dream come true for Vincent. It really wasn't fair, but…

Watching Cloud and Leon accept crystal glasses of pink champagne, Myde couldn't help but hate every inch of the darkened room.

Deep blue light that shifted ever so subtly—slow ripples—reflected off a thousand glasses and knives in the room until the air itself glowed. Gold and lapis fixtures in the shape of whelk shells and white spindles speckled the walls and tables tastefully, glittering life-like in the watery light.

Yuffie took in the gilt eagerly, and Myde was momentarily worried that she'd leap up and check if the golden decorations were nailed down or not. That fear was put to rest by the thought that if she did try to steal something, she'd most definitely be caught, and then they'd all get thrown out. Only the fact that he'd rather not get his friend arrested stopped Myde from encouraging her kleptomaniac tendencies.

The quiet murmuring and laughter from other VIP guests and almost inaudible jazz music from the edges of the room were the only noises to break the silence that had settled over their table. It wasn't an entirely uncommon silence—Cloud and Leon were not what Myde would call talkative people—but with Yuffie bedazzled, there was no one to chat with at all. A niggling sense of awkwardness came over Myde, and he cast around for things to say, just so _something_ would be said.

"Umm… We're having some really great weather, huh?" Okay, so making small talk was not his strongest point.

Leon had the decency to "Hm", while Cloud just stared, not quite sure what to make of such a terrible conversation starter. Myde deserved some credit though: small talk with Cloud and Leon was like having wisdom teeth extracted minus Novocain.

Thankfully, he was saved from further embarrassment by the distant thunder of feet. With all the squealing and stomping of a stampeding herd of zebra, the rest of the line poured in, taking up seats mostly along the second level. Over the stomping and talking, Myde wouldn't have been able to make conversation even if he screamed.

The torrent of people seemed endless, but at last it trickled off.

"This place is totally sold out," Yuffie chimed, taking in the staff rushing to bring extra chairs to patrons left standing. "Good thing Vinnie got us in…"

"It did seem like there were more people than normal outside." Myde was quick to keep the conversation going, not that he really knew what normal for the Cerulean was.

"It's because of who's playing here tonight," Cloud mused.

Myde perked up a little at the thought. He hadn't been to a concert in forever…

"Who?"

It was Leon who answered. "The Gullwings."

"Really?" Myde asked, at the exact same moment that Yuffie groaned.

Normally he and Yuffie had identical taste in music—rock and 80s synth—but even though he normally didn't bother with bubblegum pop, YuRiPa's album was Myde's guilty pleasure. Their music was just _fun_ to listen to, and he hadn't ever passed up the chance until this morning.

Yuffie, on the other hand, hated the YRP gang with Fire3 passion. Maybe seeing them in concert would finally convince her that Yuna's voice wasn't computerized and fake.

"Hey… How'd you know the Gullwings were playing tonight Leon?" Yuffie narrow-eyed their brunet friend as if she expected him to say he'd come just to watch scantily-clad girls dance around on stage.

"There was a giant poster on the front of the building."

"Oh." Yuffie deflated, the opportunity to tease tugged out from under her. She dusted herself off fairly well by snatching the program card that had nestled among the delicate glass centerpiece on their table. Chocolate eyes scanned the program with abandon, finding what she was seeking near the bottom.

"Vinnie said he's reading a totally new story this time… and it's supposed to be really scary." She spared a sly look in Myde's direction.

All right, so Vincent's first book had given Myde such horrible nightmares that his mother had forbidden him from reading anything else by "V. Valentine", and every time he saw the word "chaos" Myde fought the urge to run and hide, but… this one couldn't be as bad, right? He could totally just tune it out if he had to, right?

After all, it wasn't like Vincent really needed Myde's support. Since Dark Horse had picked up his first novel two years ago—right when Vincent was fresh out of Intermediate Fiction—he'd gained a cult following. Most of the teenagers here had probably bought tickets to see the Gullwings, but Myde bet a fair share of people had come just for Vincent too.

"You know…" Leon mused, "There's been a lot of scary stories going around lately."

Cloud got a distant, contemplative look on his face. "I heard some lady saw a bunch of white monsters appear out of nowhere in the city this morning."

"I heard that too!" Yuffie chimed. "But it's gotta be bogus. That lady was just making it up for attention."

Myde stifled a nervous laugh.

"No," Yuffie drawled, "I heard something really scary the other day." She looked at them each in turn, as if gauging their attention to her words. "And you might like this one Myde—you know how they call the hospital Rufus Memorial, after Rufus Shinra?"

"Everyone knows that," Cloud muttered.

"Well I heard that Rufus Shinra _isn't dead_. Remember that big scandal about who would handle the company after that weird gas explosion? Everybody was crying foul play, remember? So they dug up ol' Ruffy's grave to do another autopsy… but the grave was _empty_."

"You're making this one up Yuffie," Leon sighed.

"No way! I heard it from a respectable source!"

"Who?"

"I'm not at the liberty to disclose."

Leon rolled his eyes.

"But really! I heard that they're hiding Rufus somewhere in the hospital and at night you can hear the sound of his electric wheelchair echoing through the halls! And they've got him all wrapped up like a ghost because he was so horribly disfigured in the accident!"

Myde had to resist the urge to roll his eyes too.

"Oh man," Yuffie's face lit up, "we should totally tell Vincent about this! It'd make a great horror story. And you work in RMH Myde, you get inside information. Oh my God, you work with crazy people! I bet you know all kinds of freaks who would make great characters for Vincent's books!"

Chester flashed in Myde's head with little provocation. And then, of course, there was Ienzo, who was scary in that really unassuming way, what with his criminal background…

"—and you could totally—" Yuffie rattled off another hundred or so things Myde could share with Vincent in order to produce the ultimate in scary insane asylum story, but eventually her eagerness started to wane. It was replaced by impatience. "Man, when's this show going to start?"

As if in answer, the blue light filling the room dimmed, and the stage went black.

"Ladies and gentlemen," tolled a thick and exotic voice through the room, "good evening."

Electric azure lights danced across the stage floor, silhouetting a slender, curving figure, at once mysterious and sensual. "Tonight," the woman purred in heavy accent, "you have come to hear, to see, to _taste_ the finest our city can offer."

She ghosted toward the lip of the stage in slow and measured footsteps, one foot in front of the other, and the lights that followed behind, beneath, seemed to dance in time to the animal sway of her hips. The azure lamps that made her dark skin glow glinted on the long white strands of her hair.

"Tonight, let your minds feast on the richness of our artists. Let yourself be pulled beneath the waves—" the lights rippled "—of our ingenuity… and _enjoy_." She gave a pearl smile, and her wide blue eyes glittered. "I'm your host, Kida Nedakh, and on behalf of Cove Enterprises, welcome to the Cerulean."

The applause was deafening and Myde clapped along mechanically, wondering if they all weren't a little hypnotized by the swell of lights and Kida's foreign voice, but before he had the chance to ask if the others were feeling dizzy, music was pouring through the room from the band that seemed to have just materialized on stage.

Through the first group and the second and the third, that strange dizziness clung to him—made his eyes show to respond to the movements of his head. His heart, on the inside of his ribs, drummed just a little too quickly. He thought it was fear, apprehension, his body bracing for the inevitable meeting with—

But it wasn't. Myde remembered fear—came in waves, came and drowned you—and this… this was something else. This was… more like slipping than falling, more like skimming the dark than sinking…

He was disconnecting. All the pins and needles that tacked him to the world were being plucked out by some invisible hand, by—

Yuffie bobbing in time to the music… the way the blue-cast to the air made Cloud's eyes glow… the quarter-smile on Leon's face that the brunet had no idea was there—

It was how they were all happy while he sat there festering, rotting from the inside out, not knowing why he came, not knowing why he did anything anymore. It was how they could sit around enjoying music, because nothing was _wrong_ in their perfect little worlds tonight. They didn't have to worry about looking over their shoulder and coming face to face with the man who'd ruined everything, didn't go to work to fix everyone else's problems and pretend they didn't have any of their own.

They still had their hearts.

But if feelings proved you had a heart, Myde thought he must have had one too. Bitterness this deep couldn't be faked.

Blue lights swirled, the rise and fall of some poet's voice reverberated in the back of his skull; even Yuffie was sliding out of focus. He loved his friends, really, really, but… he didn't belong with them anymore.

Myde thought about all the things he didn't know and wondered if he had ever belonged with them.

Where _did_ Nobodies belong? Where _could_ monsters fit in?

Fine hairs on the back of his neck rose as the impossible notion that Cloud or Yuffie or Leon might _realize, _might find out the truth—_you're not like us_—and hate him swept into his head. He could never tell them.

It was stupid but… it hurt. It hurt that even if they told him all their stories, even if they shared all their secrets, he'd never be able to return the favor.

"Do you ever wish…" he mused in a lull of applause and music. "Do you ever wish you could forget something you've learned?"

His friends looked up, varying degrees of confusion playing across their faces.

"Do you ever wish you could go back to being stupid?"

For a moment their table was silent and Myde wished he'd never said anything at all. Then Yuffie was laughing. "Aw Myde, you'll always be stupid." But Yuffie was the only one laughing. Stormy grey and electric blue eyes searched Myde; Cloud's pale hand lifted to touch his own shoulder and there was some current of… of similarity and they really got it and…

The bitterness was wrung out him like dirty water from a dish towel. Myde was left feeling like he'd been mean, like he'd been selfish and there really wasn't any such thing as a perfect life, was there?

_Are you okay?_ howled the newest singer on stage. _You look pretty low, very handsome awkward!_

Under Leon's dress shirt, the silver chain from which Griever swung shone gently in the light. Myde wondered if he didn't fit in with them a little better than he wanted to admit.

_Pretty low! Pretty handsome awkward!_

Myde didn't feel as dizzy anymore. But the far-off pain that just came naturally from sitting in this place wouldn't leave him.

The band bowed off the stage among shrieking that should have been reserved for a rock concert—Yuffie's shouting more than audible over the rest—and then both music and raucous applause sheared off as Kida sidled back on.

"Are your hearts pounding?" she called to the audience. "Good. Remember the feeling—because when Vincent Valentine makes your heart stop, it might never start again."

"It's Vinnie's turn!" Yuffie squealed, throwing her hands up like a four-year-old who'd just been told she could have ice cream for dinner.

The lights went dead. Then the gunshots started.

Several girls on the second tier screamed before their dates could assure them the noise was recorded. The room wavered in pitch black for another second, and then red light began to drip down the walls.

Yuffie 'ooh'ed but Myde had to hold back a shudder. This was starting to look a little too much like the Amityville Horror movie for his liking.

Somewhere in the back of the room an echoing whisper, a hundred indiscernible voices and the endless ticking of a clock, began to run. It picked up intensity as it slithered through the audience, joining its voices with muffled shrieks and cracks and caws of ravens until the sound rang and howled and lashed and sped through the whole room straight toward the stage where Myde was sure it would reach a deafening pitch and—

The howl struck the stage like a hurricane and became Vincent Valentine.

"Let us go."

A field of red and black splashed over the stage background, lighting alabaster skin and bleeding into the crimson frock coat that clung to the lines of Vincent's back. He spun suddenly to face them, wild black strands of his hair floating weightlessly behind. Red eyes glinted in the dim.

"Let us go then, you and I."

Yuffie was not the only girl to sigh as Vincent's black velvet voice washed over them. Myde did shudder then; the cool, quiet drawl of their friend's voice had never seemed as ominous as it did there in the darkened room, ghosting through the speakers like EVP.

"That was how he kept them—" Vincent murmured, "—with seven words and a gallon of formaldehyde."

"He doesn't look too comfortable." Leon's unconcerned-concerned comment went ignored by Yuffie, but Cloud nodded and Myde noticed it suddenly too: Vincent looked tense. Not nervous, but out of his element, definitely. He hadn't even thought about it, but Vincent wasn't really any more talkative than Cloud or Leon, and getting up and reciting pages and pages in front an audience a thousand people strong was probably incredibly daunting. Not to mention having fussy ladies in Wardrobe (all right, Myde didn't know if they were fussy or not) dressing you up in clothes that looked great despite having been out of fashion of a good two hundred years probably wasn't making the reading any easier.

"—licked his smoky muzzle with a formless, yellow tongue. The bricks of the house cooled his chest, his stomach, as he sunk through cracks in the mortar—"

Myde hated monster stories. He hated them like he hated this building and like he hated that man—irony turned in his gut at the thought that the monster who loomed over his life was more human than himself. Myde just wished Vincent would shut up and Yuffie would shut up with her excited whimpers and that stupid Cloud and Leon would stop enjoying themselves because it made him, made him—

"—am I?' he asked the air of the room, but was heard by his coquettish lady. 'Oh, you're no Michelangelo, that's for sure!' she giggled, 'You're a great lot of nothing, that's what you are. No form to you at all.' She was teasing, but if she'd only known—"

Where was the terror? It should have been here by now, he was sure, because half the Cerulean was panicked gasping, whispering things like _she's gonna die_, and _does he know what he's doing? Oh, he knows…_ And the bodies were lining up and choking up while Vincent's artist anti-hero failed to stop himself from swallowing them whole, damask and all. As the anti-hero artist tried to hold himself together, saying _I lost control_, _I didn't mean to_, _it's not me, this yellow fog that licks at women's windowsills_.

Myde wondered if all monsters hated monster stories.

"—and he noticed that they noticed. He noticed that their whispers now were not of artists gone and past, but of him, and the way he was losing himself in tendrils, how his arms and legs were growing thin—"

No, no, Myde wanted to cry, that is not it at all, not how it happens. They were not supposed to notice until the dramatic turn when he'd reveal his true hideousness, and they'd reel back and their rejection would force the moment to its crisis; the monster anti-hero would swallow them all, unless that one woman whom he stopped himself from killing—

"—in her arms (pale and white arms which ended in hands that seemed born to stir him)—"

_She looks like Lucrecia, huh Vincent, with her 'waves of light brown hair'… _That's why the man, half-fiend now, lingered in her garden, spun himself around her house but never came closer than that, never breathed her air into his wet and formless self. Despite wanting, _wanting_…

Myde knew the story was Vincent's, all Vincent's inner-demons, but who said Vincent could pretend to suffer like that, pretend to be an abomination while Myde, some foreign creature, sat there _not_ losing himself to everything he feared and everything he hated?

"—how? How can I prevent this? I lose my heart each time I close my eyes! That is the order of my life which was chosen for me. If only I had been a blind creature forcing out a living in the coldest, darkest depths of the ocean—then and only then would she have been safe from me! How can I go against that which has been decided by fate? How can I fight for her when all the world screams for me to kill her?

Do I dare disturb the universe?'"

"I have to go." Myde crushed the waver from his voice, tried not to shiver when three sets of confused eyes met his.

All he knew was that he had to get out of this place, had to get away from Vincent's monotone smooth voice telling him he was going to lose it, couldn't change a thing; he had to get away from Vincent's monsters, because Vincent didn't know a damn thing about monsters, didn't know what it was like to be in that place where you could only disturb the universe one way and not the way that would fix anything. Vincent did not know what it was like to have his heart broken by the one person in the world who couldn't care less and Vincent had never had to realize that he'd ruined everything, never had to keep smiling through all that guilt only to find out none of it—none—of—it—mattered because he'd never had a real heart in the first place.

All Myde knew was that he had to get out of this place with its blue blood walls and all the bad scent of abandonment. So he stood, turned, and headed for the door, not caring if Vincent or anyone noticed him leaving.

"Scared?" Yuffie snickered to his back.

"Yeah," he said truthfully, "Yeah, I am."

But of _what_ exactly, Myde wasn't sure.

"—can I redeem myself? No, I don't think I can."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

He stumbled down the windowless hallway, its halogen-lined ceiling never flickering because, of course, the Cerulean was too perfect of a place to ever have a flickering bulb. The stairs seemed infinitely far away, like he was walking the same ten steps over and over again and never getting any closer to his goal.

But at last he reached them, and the soft green "Exit" glow was a more welcome light than Myde had ever seen. The door was impossibly heavy under his hands, but he pushed it free and shuffled into the chill of the night like digging his way out of a grave. The first few gulps of cool, fresh air seared his lungs, helped his pounding heart slow. He hadn't even realized how out of breath he was, how wide-eyed and terrified he must have looked.

He wanted to collapse against the building and lay there on the sidewalk just drinking in the air until the stars stopping turning overhead. If he could just slip out of time somehow and lay forever…

But not here. Not here in the shadow of the Cerulean, not when there was still the slightest chance that he could brush against that person… He was free though. He had made it out without seeing him, without confrontation… Now all he had to do was walk two blocks to the bus stop, get on that oppressive, diesel-belching, greasy-windowed monstrosity and go home—home where so many layers of walls could protect him from everything, and from nothing.

Myde felt exhausted—so tired that he could barely lift his foot to take another step. But he did. He had to, to get safe and home, to get away from—

"Sir, should I have someone bring the car around?"

"Of course."

_No no nononoohgodno_. Myde's legs shook underneath him. He'd known. He'd known that this could not be avoided, that was his sort of luck (his sort of karma, maybe), but he had hoped… The weight of eyes as heavy as a guillotine settled on him and Myde knew that even if he ran it wouldn't change anything. _He_ was right there—right there and standing between the Cerulean exit and the bus stop.

Myde wouldn't cry. He wouldn't cry this time.

The blond drew a shuddering breath and steeled himself, steadied himself in case his legs did decide to give out. Then, at last, he looked up and met glacial blue eyes.

_You'll always be my little baby boy, who had the biggest blue eyes, just like—_

It didn't matter that Myde's eyes were more green than blue now; it didn't matter that the man had flyaway brown hair or was built taller and more slender. Myde would always resemble his father.

Perpetually cold eyes narrowed, full lips set into a scowl, and his father's voice—a knife through ice—murmured, "You were told not to come here."

Myde wanted to scream, wanted to shout and punch that unchanging face in until there was nothing left but a bloody mess; Myde wanted to be Vincent's monster and tear and tear and tear and say _I can do anything I want—I don't answer to you selfish _heartless _bastard_! But Myde was too weak to say anything at all, and his father didn't care to say anything else.

The silence pressed, but he couldn't move. It was like he was frozen to the cement sidewalk, waiting for the world to end. Or maybe for an explanation.

He would never get either. He would never get either just like he never got anything from his father except tanned skin and long arms and the ability to hate someone with his whole being.

_Why?_ He'd asked it the first time they had met—here, in this tower of blue-lit lies—and _why?_ he wanted to ask now, eight years later, still not knowing the reason. But it wouldn't have mattered anyway because no one could undo what _he_ had done. He couldn't make amends with words, especially if he never gave those words in the first place.

_Do something!_ Myde screamed at himself. _Just walk away!_ He would have given anything to get out from under that condescending stare. He was not an insect, not worthless, not… not a nobody.

"I thought I made it clear when I last saw you," the man said low and sharp, "that I have no responsibility for what happened to Mariana Cistern."

_For me_, Myde thought.

"I don't want to see you here again."

It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that _he_ could stand there in his perfectly pressed suit and tie and not… care? Love Myde? Have one shred of human decency? It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair but Myde didn't know how to fix it. There were so many things he wanted to scream, but nothing would come out.

When the man who had ruined everything disappeared, with a glint of diamond cufflinks, into the back seat of a limo, Myde could do nothing but watch.

The limousine turned a corner; every ounce of strength that had kept Myde on his feet in front of his father vanished in an instant and he crashed into the sidewalk, scraping the palms of his hands raw.

"I HATE YOU!" Now he could shout, now when it meant nothing. "I hate… hate you…" Tears prickled in his eyes despite how hard Myde tried to hold them back.

There was something wrong with this world. It wasn't meant to be fair, but it wasn't allowed to be this wrong. Ronan Cove sipped martinis from his presidential office at the top of the Cerulean while his son—his bastard son, his _not-mine_ son—fought with the voices in his head and the monsters at his beck and call.

Normally it didn't matter. Normally he could put it away because his mother didn't need anyone, and he didn't need anyone but his friends who wouldn't leave him. Normally it didn't matter, but right now, when they had been so close, and there had been so much Myde could have done, it all came crashing down on him, a cacophony of memories half-empty.

He just… he just hated him. Because of what happened to Mariana, what happened eight years ago… because Cistern was his mom's last name and half of Myde's birth certificate was blank.

He'd told Yuffie. He'd told her everything because she didn't care about these kinds of things and she wouldn't pity him. But maybe all along he'd wanted a little pity, wanted someone to tell him that horrible things always happened to the best people and that his mother didn't love him just to spite his father, just because she needed _someone_. He'd told Yuffie how Mariana had finally told him the truth, and about how, at twelve years old, he'd come to the Cerulean determined to drag his wayward father home—only to find out President Cove was already married to another Very Nice Lady. Had always been married to her.

_I don't want to see you… I don't want to see you…_

Tears spotted the sidewalk; Myde had long since given up on stopping them. It was hate and it should have frozen him all up inside, but instead it came down again and again like a hammer on glass. It didn't even burn… it just _hurt_.

"You're… you're a liar Zexion."

Myde would have given anything to be emotionless in this moment. He would have given away the hate in a heartbeat, would have embraced the hollowness that took him sometimes if it would just come. But there was only the too-fast sound of his heart and the endless ache that _nothing_, nothing could ever sooth away.

_If we don't have hearts, how come this hurts so bad? _

He just wanted someone to explain things for once, to give him reasons _why_ these things happened to _him_ of all people. He just wanted to fit in and make his mom happy and go on living as himself.

Why was everything, _everything_ wrong?

Was it ever going to be right?

He wanted to know; he was so sick of not understanding. He was so sick of nodding along like he comprehended the motivations of everyone else in this world just because he was a psychology major. He didn't even understand himself—whoever he was supposed to be. _Not-mine_, _My'_, _Myde_, _Demyx_.

The cracked plastic of his cell phone was cooling his scraped hand before Myde realized he'd pulled it out of his pocket. The dull blue glow of the Cerulean's walls and the yellow streetlights cast glare on the screen, but Myde's fingers tapped speed-dial three without needing to see.

As the phone rang, another muffled sound—gathering in intensity—rang up from the depths of the building behind him. Yuna was singing her bubblegum pop, if Myde was making out the far away words right.

_What can I do for you? I can't hear you!_

The phone rang again.

Someone picked up the line. "Umm, ah, hello! You've reached Rufus Memorial Hospital. If this is an emergency—"

_And though I know the world of real emotion has surrounded me, I won't give in to it!_

"M-Miss Belle?" His voice was still thick from crying.

"No, Belle went home a while ago. I'm Fa Mulan. Erm, I mean, I'm the night receptionist, Fa Mulan." She seemed a little unsure of herself, but Myde didn't have the energy to make anyone smile.

_Now I know that forward is the only way my heart can go…_

"Oh… I'm Myde, I work—is Doctor Gainsborough there?"

"I don't think so… um, but I could look for her…"

He breathed slow and steady to stop his shaking. "Can you… can you just put me through to I-Ienzo's room?"

There was silence on the other end before: "_Ienzo_? I'm don't know if he's allowed to—"

"Please."

Mulan made some unsure noise on the other side of the phone, but suddenly that grating ring was back.

It rang once, twice, and then a quietly surprised voice murmured "Hello?"

_I hear your voice calling out to me…_

"Hey um… can we talk?" He wiped the last few tears out of his eyes.

"About what Demyx?"

"Just… anything. Everything."

Ienzo scoffed quietly, but when he answered there was patience in it. "All right. Everything."

_You'll never be alone._

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ģăŧђεŗ – ίη– ŧ ђ ε – Ģăłė : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

1) **As always, my full and undying gratitude goes to DG**, who suffered through this beast of a chapter with good spirits intact.

2) An answer to last chapter's trivia: Mariana is the name of the deepest ocean trench in the world, and also the name of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, about a women who waits eternally for a love who will never return. And, of course... More **Trivia Time!** _Vincent's story is based on (and borrows quite a few lines from) which famous work Modernist poetry?_ (This one is easy!) A second, harder question: _somewhere in this chapter I used a foreign phrase which is both the name of a chilling piece of classical music AND the title of a contemporary "history of horror" book-which one?_ Kudos to those people who find both!

3) The lyrics in the chapter are by The Used and Sweetbox, respectively.

**Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alerts list!**


	6. Art of the Arcane

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ II_

Ëηŧŗăŧā – Äđāġίσ :

Ả ŗ ŧ – σ f – ŧ ђ ε – Ảŗċąηė

This chapter is dedicated to FortunaStoryteller and The Light's Refrain.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Who can say how much of the good poetry in this world has come out of madness?_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

"'Not guilty' does not always mean 'innocent,'" the defense attorney is explaining, in the slow and enunciating voice reserved for nervous children. She turns the chair—with him in it, an eleven-year-old, an inconsequential weight—until she can half-kneel in front of him, tucking her drab pencil skirt under her knees. The tight line of her brow—whispering _wariness_ to him—belies the way she holds his unwavering stare with her own. She doesn't blink; not long ago, he would have been unsettled, but now he is a child in body only, and the only thing that invokes the memory of fear is…

"'Not guilty by reason of insanity' means that even though you committed the crime, nobody blames you, because something up here—" she touches his forehead and a shadow of disgust wells up in the back of his throat "—something up here made you do bad things without asking if you wanted to do those things. Insanity is only a legal word, all right? It doesn't mean that you're crazy or you're sick. It just means that right now, we don't know a lot about what's going on in your head—" the heat of her fingers against his temple is making him sick "—and that's why the judge and jury are sending you to see a doctor."

She shakes a little, from balancing on her high heels, and at last she drops her hand from his face to hold herself up. "Shinra Med is an excellent hospital; I know you'll like it. They have a room all ready for you, and they told me you can even bring some of your puzzles.

"Ienzo—" a little softer, a deal more sincere "—you'll only have to stay there for a little while, okay? Just until the doctors are sure that whatever made you lose control this time won't come back."

_It was always there and never there and always will be and will not be there._

When he does not move or answer, she falters, holds his small hand on the arm of the chair as if that solves something. "I want you to remember that nobody blames you."

_Except my parents._

It doesn't bother him.

Then she is standing, brushing her skirt with ruby and gold acrylic nails that do nothing to hide the stubbiness of her fingers. When she motions for him to follow, he slides unsteadily from the chair, the starched backs of his pant legs catching on old leather. Her hand finds the small of his back as she leads him from the room, and all he can think of is how—

_nails felt against his arms, and—_

_impossible to escape, crushing, _crawling_ on him and—_

_under his clothing, under his skin, in his bones, in his throat—_

—her touch is a memory that smells of sulfur and rotting flesh and feels like darkness itself.

"Don't touch me please."

She pulls her hand away as if it had been bitten, but the look on her face is something like pity. "I just don't want you to worry, okay? Your parents will be able to visit, and… Shinra will take good care of you."

Ienzo Amaryllis is three weeks, five days, eight hours, two minutes past his eleventh birthday and needs no one.

In the dim and empty hallway of the court house—the dark type of hallway that is perpetually quarter-filled with golden window silhouettes and the dust that light makes visible—Ienzo listens to his lawyer's footsteps echoing off the polished wood, the cold black and white marble tiles, and the vaulted ceiling. _Click, click, click. _He wonders suddenly if court shoes always sound like clocks, ticking on forever, not caring about the passage of the time they keep. It is not something eleven-year-olds should be wondering, but he hasn't considered himself a child since… Zexion... And then he wonders—

"Will I be allowed to have a nightlight?"

Behind her glasses, the defense attorney's bitter-chocolate eyes flare open. She freezes where she stands, the last echoes of her steps dying out as her tongue stumbles over a number of answers. He expects a "Yes, but why?" or an "I'm sorry", but she finds her voice with all its disbelief and human sadness and says:

"Are you afraid of the dark, Ienzo?"

For the first time since the verdict was read, Ienzo hesitates.

He doesn't know which of his lives should answer.

In the golden dark of the court house, his silence echoes like the ticking of a clock, and at last he—**Hey, Ienzo**—he—

He wakes up in a bed that is not his own, in a white, white room that he doesn't remember, and for a moment all he wants is his mother saying—**Ienzo!**—_please don't_—_change_—_please stay_—

**Ienzo…**

_my son._

—but all he hears is a second of silence that echoes in his ears as _but this is not the City_, and _this is not the Garden_, and _she is not your mother_, and _you are not_.

The second echoes like the ticking of court shoes and then Ienzo screams. His voice is boyish and high and rises until it burns in his ears, rises until it rings metallic and inhuman and fills the white, white room.

His scream shatters when his voice cracks, but he shrieks again, because the sheets under his back are white and starched, not blue and holding the smell of fabric softener; because the windows only open thirty-seven millimeters, the double bed is too big for his child-sized body, and there are no glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling.

And his heart is gone.

The howl tearing in his throat is senseless noise, but inside his head the words are—_wheredidIloseit_—_wherewhyKingdomHeartswhy_—_pleasewhere—_am_—I?—_racing. His heart is gone, his heart is gone, hisheartisgone and there is _nothing_ inside him, slithering to fill in all the cavities of his body. All he can feel is _nothing_ flooding his stomach, pushing on his diaphragm, eating the marrow in his bones—pulsing along his veins to the beat of that thing pounding in his chest.

—_I have to find it! Can't be—can't—brokenmissingempty—can't _be_! Ihavetofindit!_—

He claws at the sheets, fingernails pressing white above the quick. His voice is dry and shaking, but he pushes again, as if he can scream out the feeling of being hollow, scream out the _nothing_ maggots multiplying and devouring inside him.

Ienzo doesn't understand how emptiness alone can fill the place where a hundred emotions once lived. It's like they've sealed him up, closed all the tiny gaps where everything else got in (got out) and then sucked the air, the feeling, away. Somewhere deep in the back of his mind Ienzo hears his teacher asking, _Which falls faster in a vacuum: a stone or a feather? _And he hears his own voice whisper, _In the absence of—_

His heart is a hollow where despair and content are indistinguishable, wrapped so tightly in nothing that they fall through him together.

No one sees the difference, but he knows that in his chest there is a vacuum, from which feeling has been drawn like air, from which the air has been removed, leaving—there is _nothing_ spilling into, filling the tiny pathways, paralyzing his lungs. He chokes on his scream, gasping for breath that can't get past the constriction of his throat.

Flecks of darkness flash in his eyes; his head swims, a shuddering mantra of _myheartisgone Ican'tbreathemyheart isgoneIhavetofindit!_

He's drowning in the emptiness—cold, dark water filling his mouth—being pulled into black. Panic (or something like it) sets in; he tries to scream again, but the sound is different now, breathless and frantic.

_In the absence of_—

He wants his desk in the back of the fifth grade classroom. —_resistance,_ s_tones and feathers fall_— He wants _Ienzo_'s mother saying _it's a ward against darkness._

Ienzo doesn't hear the door slamming open. He doesn't see the nurses except for their hands. In the early morning dim of the room, their snatching hands look black and misshapen, like claws closing over his shoulders and arms and—he lashes out before he realizes he has done it, scratching and kicking at whatever part of the dark forms he can reach.

"He's hyperventilating! Get Doctor Gast, _now_!"

His world swims, a finger-painting of black and white and anxious, soft words.

"Calm down, Ienzo. Calm down."

He pushes against the hands holding him down. "Let me go!" The words barely make it out of him, airy and panting, but their vehemence is unchecked, because this is just like _that_ time and they are just like his—"Let me go!"

_Don't stand in my way! Don'tstandinmyway!_

"I have to find it!" he chokes. "I HAVE TO FIND IT!"

"Bring a sedative!" Then, "Calm down. You have to calm down. Breathe slowly."

**Please—**

"Ssh. Deep breaths."

**—Ienzo**

"Ienzo, you have to—"

**Wake up!**

"Ienzo!"

**Zexion! **

"Ienzo!"

**WAKE UP!**

He—woke up suddenly to too-green eyes, hovering uncomfortably close.

"Jeez!" Myde breathed. "You almost gave me a heart attack!" The fuzzy outline of aqua eyes disappeared, and Ienzo was left staring at a white corkboard ceiling, its tiny black ventilation holes swimming in and out of focus. For a long moment, he wasn't quite sure where—or when—he was. It was unlikely, but not impossible, that he was still dreaming.

"Demyx?" Ienzo sat up in bed and tried to ignore the first stirrings of what would later be a migraine worth writing to medical journals about.

Myde wrinkled his nose. "I toldddd youuu not to call me—"

"What time is it?" Through the slats in the blinds, Ienzo could see the brilliant sunrise that had given the city its name. Myde shrugged, pointing with the clipboard in one hand to the watchless wrist of his free arm.

"It's a little after six, I think." The intern moved back to sprawl in Ienzo's teal chair.

Ienzo's hair was knotted miserably on one side, blue-steel poking out at angles hair shouldn't have been able to achieve, and when he tried to run his fingers through it, they caught painfully. "And what day is it?" he managed.

Myde was trying not to stare. But gawking was sort of the natural reaction in the face of completely obvious questions being asked by very subtle people with not-so-subtle bedheads. "…It's Wednesday. Yesterday was Tuesday. The day before that was Monday."

"Yes, I imagined that would be the case. The day before Tuesday is usually Monday." Ienzo lifted a hand—_stop shaking!_—to pinch the bridge of his nose. It did nothing to alleviate the now constant pounding behind his left eye, but clenching his eyelids shut did block out the violet room (and the painfully curious stare Demyx was tossing in his direction). Everything seemed to be in place, from the color of the walls to the awkward intern, but his stomach was still roiling and his hands were still shaking. He was still afraid.

But fear was an emotion, and Ienzo could only feel emotions in memories in dreams.

With sudden determination, he dropped his hand from his face and leveled a glare in Myde's direction. "How do you spell Pseudopseudo-hypoparathyroidism?"

"What? Um… S… No wait, pseudo totally starts with a p… right? P… S..." Myde floundered. "Um..."

Ienzo fell back against his pillow with a sigh that someone else would have called relieved. If this were a dream, Demyx would have rattled the letters off with ease. "I'm awake then."

"Umm yeah, I coulda told you that," Myde chimed in, a puzzled but pleasant smile lighting his face. "It took you long enough to wake up. I called your name for like ten minutes." Myde's smile fell as something like awkward concern stole on to his face. "You're okay, right? It looked like… you were having a nightmare."

"I was remembering."

Myde looked away. He knew that sometimes memories were more frightening than bad dreams. The silence weighed heavy and awkward for a moment, and inside his head, Myde furiously debated sharing what he'd been thinking about since the end of their phone call. His fingers traced the sticky plastic arm of the chair while thoughts like _It's nothing special—but it's a dumb thing to say!_ and _Maybe I should just tell him_… ran through his head. He opened his mouth finally, firmly set on telling Ienzo—

"That must have been a pretty bad memory. You kinda look like you got hit by a semi-truck." Well he definitely hadn't intended to say _that_. "Er, I mean…"

If sarcasm were a color, it would most certainly have been the shade of Ienzo's caustic stare. "If someone hadn't seen fit to keep me on the phone until four in the morning, perhaps I would look less like a motor vehicle accident."

"Hey!" Myde wagged a finger toward Ienzo's evident frown. "You didn't _have_ to stay on the phone. You could have easily hung up on me."

Ienzo blinked twice, his frown falling into something he would never, ever admit was a gape. In all the hours that Myde had filled with one-sided conversation (half the time so choked by the wavering of his voice that the words were virtually unintelligible), the thought of hanging up had never once crossed Ienzo's mind.

_It's because I don't get phone calls_, he rationalized. But that should have made him more willing to hang up, not less, and just because he never got calls didn't mean he thought people usually talked through an entire night.

Ienzo chose not to think about it anymore. Snapping his mouth shut from what was Not A Gape, he finally managed an "I was sorely tempted."

Blank confusion wrinkled Myde's brow before the intern realized Ienzo's very belated witticism referred to hanging up. A toothy grin snuck its way onto the intern's face. "Noooo you weren't! You didn't even think about it!"

The sound of Myde laughing—at _him_—stirred something unpleasant in Ienzo's stomach. He looked away. "Don't you have something to be doing?"

A self-important smile spread across the intern's face, and he waved the clipboard dismissively in Ienzo's direction. "I have a whole list of very important things to be doing!"

"Which you are effectively blowing off." The nearly imperceptible smirk that darted across his lips without thought did not surprise Ienzo so much as his genuine interest in the list of duties tacked to the clipboard. Leaning slightly to pluck the clipboard from Myde's hands ("Hey! I was going to show—"), Ienzo surveyed the list of duties. Most of them were petty—morning greetings being the least of the busy work shoved off onto Myde—but here and there meaningful observations were thrown in. Myde had the role of assisting in group therapy, Ienzo noted with near-sympathy.

It was then that Ienzo realized Myde had never finished talking.

"—came in early so I'd have time to talk to you, but you took so long getting up, that I've got to go in like a minute."

Ienzo resisted the urge to ask what else Myde could possibly have to talk about that the five hour phone call had not been able to encompass. In all actuality, there were things he still wanted to say too. Lots of things. He didn't know how much Myde had remembered, or how patient the other boy would be with when it came to long-winded descriptions of castles that never were. Demyx, Zexion remembered, was constantly being thrown out of meetings for grating on more than a few last nerves. If Demyx's short attention span could ruffle Xemnas (who Zexion firmly believed had the patience of a god), Ienzo wasn't sure he'd get anywhere.

He handed the intern back his clipboard with a cursory "Hmm" by way of analysis, faking disinterest—though he didn't need to.

Some time during their late night phone call, Myde had realized Ienzo was someone that would never have spoken to him had they crossed paths on the street or had a class together at university. Ienzo was cool, calculating, the type to sit down and shut up in lecture and then, in the last ten minutes of class, speak out, raising some counter argument that utterly invalidated the professor's opinion and sent students scattering from the classroom wondering why their tuition wasn't going towards hiring actual experts.

If he was a stereotype, Myde had decided, Ienzo would be the understated glasses-wearing, scarf-toting, courier-bag-carrying pretty kid who sat in the back of the class and whom _everyone_, whether they would admit it or not, wanted to be study buddies with. He was also, Myde thought, the type to turn down every study group offer because he had something else to do that hour. Namely, attending an international chess tournament. So sorry.

All right, so he didn't wear glasses and maybe Ienzo wouldn't bother with the scarf. Unless it was cold or something, because Ienzo was definitely a function-before-form sort of person... Except he sorta had the form too, didn't he?

"If you're going to daydream, please stare blankly in a different direction," Ienzo deadpanned, wondering why exactly Myde's vaguely-glazed gawking made him almost uncomfortable.

"Ah!" Demyx gave that odd little bounce of his, waving his hands wildly in dismissal. "I wasn't staring at you! Well, I kinda was, but—!"

"You're going to be late," Ienzo interjected.

Myde looked at his empty wrist as if it might suddenly read him the time. When it didn't—and when the violet walls said lots of things, but very few numbers, Myde slowly came to the realization that he was probably late already. For the second day in a row.

"Crap!" Myde leapt out the teal chair, spun around, tripped over the chair leg, and crashed to the floor with a cringe-worthy _whump!_ all in one smooth motion. Ienzo peered over the edge of his bed, a blue eyebrow cocked.

"Have you considered trying out for the Special Olympics? With a performance like that, you'd be a shoe-in for their pity prize."

"Jerk," Myde growled, picking himself up gingerly. His knees twinged of disapproval and his chin felt more than a little scraped. There was not one day, he thought, that Rufus Memorial didn't abuse him somehow. "Besides," Myde threw over his shoulder as he stomped across the room, "the Special Olympics don't even have pity prizes."

"I suppose you would know." Ienzo's voice did the smirking for him. For a moment Myde was tempted toward indignation, to yell or whine about how he was _very smart thank you_ and _just shut up Zexion, you stupid bookworm_, but the ember fizzled out quickly. Some distant, dull part of himself was laughing amazed—was saying that none of this was how it used to be, and that… that was good.

When Myde entered the room this morning Ienzo had been sickly white and tangled in his sheets, breathing as if he had forgotten how to. Now he had regained his color, intelligence sparking like exposed wires in that near-amused cobalt stare. It was a little odd for the intern to think that his presence had such an obvious effect.

Myde paused at the door, turned. "I… umm…" He bit his lip. "Never mind. I'll see you later."

"Hm." Ienzo didn't lift his hand to wave, and with a scuffle and a click he was alone again, the air in the violet room still and shadowy as ever. He lingered in his bed, watching the sun rise through the window blinds. For a few long seconds the only sound was the ticking of Myde's footsteps, farther and farther away. Then Ienzo breathed, slow and long, wringing the last of the memories out.

But the feeling of dreaming would not leave him.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde slid down the hallway, making note to buy a watch at the next available opportunity, if only because it might actually get him to his duties on time. He'd buy one of those nice manly ones—not a Rolex but the Wal-Mart counterpart; the kind with knobs all over and three different alarm tones and a blue neon digital display. But then, Myde thought (to block out the ominous creaking of the elevator door as he entered it), he'd have to come up with a name for his watch, like he had for all his other prized possessions. But what would he name a watch like that? Felix. Was that a nice name for a watch?

For a moment he caught himself wondering he if ought to run the idea by Ienzo—one crazy turn deserves another—but Myde vetoed the idea quickly. Ienzo was apt to tell him Felix was the most hideous name this side of Aurora Heights and that Myde had so little taste he no longer wanted to be associated with him.

_Pfft_, Myde puffed out his cheeks, _Ienzo's the type who'd name his watch _Desdemona_. Plus, he doesn't get to say anything about my taste. His bedroom is purple_.

The elevator ground to halt and opened (a little prematurely—the floor of the elevator was a good two inches above the floor of the hall) and Myde determinately set off to perform complete morning greetings for the first time since this whole mess had started.

The pale, dull hall gave way to a row of boldly colored doors, and Myde congratulated himself on not getting lost. With only mild hesitation, he rapped on the first, vivid blue door. When no one answered, he knocked again, a little louder. Still no sound came from the blue room, so Myde cautiously slid his clearance card through the lock, cracked the door and peered inside.

"Umm, hello?" But even without answer, Myde spotted Ariel—still in her starched white nightgown, barely indistinguishable from her day clothes—leaning, frozen, against her shallow windowsill. Her long red hair was unbrushed, haphazardly bound at the back of her head. The back of her head was all Myde could see as she stared out over Rufus Memorial's front parking lot.

Even when he slunk around the piles of clutter on the floor (less, this time, than before; the fork-windchimes were gone too) to stand nearer to her, she did not blink. Up close he could see her pupils were dilated, a sign of heavy medication. For a long moment Myde stood by silently, oddly subdued, because when he had anticipated this greeting, stillness and quiet had not been a part of it.

But then her eyes, still too wide and barely moving, transformed from stones into something more liquid, tremulous with sudden longing, as if the sun through the window, making the horizon shimmer like water, had reminded her of something.

"Eric's out there," she murmured, shaking but sure, "I know it."

Myde knew what he was _supposed_ to say. What he said was "Me too."

And then he carefully bid her good morning, reminding her to get ready for breakfast. Myde knew the nurses would find Ariel in the same disarray as he had, but some quiet, near-vindictive part of himself thought maybe they deserved it.

Sidling around the dwindling piles of Ariel's odd treasures, Myde clicked the blue door shut behind him. It was only after he was back in the hall that he realized how stifling Ariel's room had been, as if he had been breathing water instead of air.

Myde looked down the hall to the rest of the colored doors and steeled himself. With a heavy sigh he approached the purple door. From up close he could hear Chester singing, his unstable voice echoing as if from a great distance. Myde knocked on the door, but Chester either did not hear him or chose not to answer, as the singing went on uninterrupted.

"'_The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'to talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax—of cabbages and kings—_"

Myde turned the doorknob and peeked into the purple room. Of course, Chester was nowhere to be seen, but the singing faded out, lingering just a bit longer than it had any right to.

"Mr. Carroll, come out…" Myde tried, sweeping the room with his eyes as he shuffled into the _Lotus Forest_. There was no Chester on the dresser, the windowsill, the bed, or in any of the empty corners of the room. Just as Myde moved to check behind the door, a voice on the right side of the room chuckled.

"Over here."

Myde's eyes darted over, but there was no one in the area where the voice had come from.

"Or perhaps over here?" chimed Chester's voice from the left side of the room. Myde twisted to look even though he knew he wouldn't find anyone.

"Or maybe—" another slue of chuckles "—right _here_." And very suddenly Myde _saw_ Chester balancing (on one foot in an incredible show of poise) on one of the round metal posts of his bed. And even though he knew for certain he had looked at the bed, Myde got the sense that Chester had been there all along and he had simply not seen him. Chester was the type of person, Myde thought, that got to choose when he was noticed.

The cat man flashed that wicked, cracking smile that Myde knew he'd never be used to and, in something of a swan dive posture, leapt off the bedpost and landed without sound, upright, on the tile floor. With his particular brand of invasion, Chester circled Myde once, as if inspecting an old friend who had changed significantly since their last meeting. His enormous yellow eyes stared unblinking at Myde, sharp despite the man's inexplicable grin.

"Well I have to go…" the intern stumbled. "Just came to say good mor—"

Chester leaned back on his heels so far that he came close to defying gravity. "_Where_ are you going?" he purred.

Myde tensed, tried to keep his eyes from darting to the door. "Ummm… down the hall."

"Of course your _feet_ are going down the hall." Chester blinked first one eye and then the other. "That's what feet do—going, that is," he added in a hushed and conspiratory tone of voice. The cat man broke into a flutter of his buoyant chuckles without warning, his luminous stare trained and piercing. "Yes your feet are going down the hall but where, _where_ is your _head_ going?" he sung.

Myde jerked back, could not stop himself from looking to the door this time. His clipboard flapped nervously in his hands. "Where is… my head going?"

"Well _that's_ an odd question…" Chester blinked again, but the cant of his lips screamed decadent awareness; _I know something you don't know_. "One would hope your head is going the same place your neck is. Although…" Switching to the tips of his bare toes the cat man danced from one side of Myde to the other, slinking behind until he was nearly back to back with the intern. Myde flinched, then held himself still like a man being circled by a starved tiger.

"That's not always a _necessity_. Some people do very well with seemingly no heads at all, and if you'd ever met the queen—" a manic chuckle "—I'm sure you would have found her fondness for separating heads and necks rather… engaging."

Behind Myde, Chester froze, turned, leaned in with no regard for personal space until the pink and purple strands of his hair scratched at Myde's ear. "But where is your _mind_ going?" he whispered.

The intern didn't breathe, screamed for Aerith in his head, and decided he'd take Dancers any day over this cat sharpening claws in his shoulders, making his brain feel ready to leak out his ears…

Without backing away, without blinking, Chester Carroll began to laugh. "To pieces," he said, and then nothing more.

Myde's toes shrieked in protest as he strained to lean away, but suddenly there was nothing to lean away from—Chester had vanished as if he'd never been there at all. Myde didn't hesitate to turn and run for the door, shouting a "Good morning!" over his shoulder.

From where he had flipped to balance on the ball of the bedpost again, Chester's crescent grin washed over the purple room, a poisonous sort of moonlight.

_"—and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings."_

Myde slammed the door behind himself and hurried down the hall, focusing on his clipboard to forget how Chester frightened, frustrated him beyond belief. The next names on the list, however, did nothing to encourage a change in his mood. _Yazoo, Loz, Kadaj_. That was all, no last name listed. Myde looked at the green door and its blinking red lock and decided maybe he'd come back.

Still shaky on his feet, Myde passed the green room and settled in front of the next door in the hall, its prison-jumpsuit-orange surface glaring at him. He glanced at his clipboard. _Yelnats, Stanley_. Myde was fairly certain he'd never met a Stanley in Rufus Memorial, but a mugshot of a curly mop of hair on a patient information sheet flashed in his mind. There was something non-threatening about mops of curly hair. With renewed confidence Myde unlocked the door and stuck his head inside the room. He gasped and then coughed, pulling back into the hall as quickly as he'd gone in.

The orange room was sickeningly hot and reeked of onions. Pressing a hand to his nose and mouth, Myde rallied another assault and made it all the way into the room. The first thing he noticed was that its dusty tangerine walls were nearly coated in posters of baseball players, and the floor was strewn with clothes and sneakers. Myde might have smiled—this room was just like his own—if it hadn't felt like a desert and stunk like a high school locker room.

The bed was decked with a handmade quilt, and lying on top of the quilt was a teenage boy in transition between overweight and well-toned. He leaned up, eyed Myde and slumped back down, waving half-heartedly. Sweat clung to the kid's brow.

"What'd they get you for?" Stanley asked.

"Ah, no, I work—" Myde coughed.

"Oh… yeah?" the boy offered in something like surprise. He gave Myde a vague thumb's up, as if the information had stopped about halfway through his head and died there.

"I'm here 'cause of my no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-grandfather." Stanley stared at the ceiling of the orange room, then knit and twiddled his fingers over his stomach.

"Oh," Myde managed. "That… sucks."

The kid laughed like he didn't believe himself either, and Myde wondered whether or not his pig-stealing great-grandfather actually existed. He paused for a moment, unsure of how to make a graceful exit, the smell almost impossible to bear. "Erm, I just came… Um… Good morning Mr. Yelnats?" It was more of a question than a greeting, and Myde wondered when this would get less awkward.

"The name's Caveman," Stanley grinned.

It was a normal, pleasant grin—not Chester's skull-cracking smile, not Ienzo's sarcastic smirk—and Myde couldn't help but grin back. "Got it."

He left the orange room feeling like Rufus Memorial might actually have some nearly sane people in it after all.

And now the only name on his roster—besides the silver-haired spawns of Satan's mother—was the occupant of the white room. Myde smiled as he cleared the last few feet to the pure white door. Rapping playfully on the cool metal surface, Myde waited for the soft "Um, come in," before turning the knob.

He squinted suddenly against the stark and painful purity of the walls, the ceiling, the sheets, the flowers on the table in the center of the totally _white_ room. It was overwhelming, and for a second Myde could do nothing but sweep his gaze over the corners, looking for shadows to help distinguish one shape from another.

His gaze snapped toward the splash of red and indigo that was Kairi, a breath of life in the sterile, frightening space of the white room.

"Hey." Kairi smiled.

"Morning," Myde managed, unable to keep himself from searching for the corners, from trying to confirm that he had stepped into a room and not a dimension made of a blank canvas, lacking even a dash of its own color. "Why is your room…" he trailed off, unsure if his question would seem rude.

"Hm?"

"…so white?" he finished finally.

"Oh!" To Myde's relief, Kairi turned to survey the place too, the small glint of teeth the sign of her continued amusement. "You know," she said, her voice like the sparkles on water in the sun, "I couldn't pick a color. Pink is my favorite, but pink walls are sorta… babyish, right?"

"I don't know," Myde admitted. He'd never seen all pink walls unless you counted the pleasant salmon in Aerith's office, and Myde was pretty sure Kairi was talking about a _real_ pink shade.

"I thought about blue too," she mused, tilting her head to the side in a way that made her short hair swing. "But the only color of blue I'd really want is the color of Sora's eyes, and they don't make paint that bright. Besides…" that quiet, too-mature voice was back, laying stillness over her like a veil. She was not Kairi, but that _other_ in that moment, that glimpse of wax crayons and pale blue sandals… "That color of blue would remind me too much of Roxas."

A sudden physical flash of hurt lanced along his sternum and made his lungs seize up for a fraction of a second. The sensation of being stabbed in the back was as palpable as the floor beneath his feet.

"Roxas…" he hesitantly tried the word, amazed by the way it seemed to linger in the air, half-breath and half-light.

_Are you worried A-?_

_…come back. He'll definitely…_

"Huh?" Kairi blinked wide eyes at him, mouth pressed into a thin, confused line. "What'd you say?"

"Roxas," Myde offered dubiously. "You said it would remind you of—"

"That's weird," Kairi tapped her chin with one delicate finger. "That name _does_ sound familiar…" her lips dropped into a small, uncertain frown, "but I can't remember who it belongs to."

_A- cut it out! That's not gonna…_

_…ordered to bring him back?_

Myde resisted the urge to tell her what he could hear, to tell her that that name belonged to… to whom? He didn't really know. Someone Demyx had known. Someone they had known. Someone… they had lost?

He kept it in, afraid of what saying it would do to her—would do to him. But what could have turned into pressing silence instead evaporated under Kairi's genuine smile, the kind that lifted even the corners of her eyes. "You know what?" she said, matter-of-fact. "You get used to white pretty quick. It reminds me of…"

Myde's mind supplied the name Kairi seemed to be searching for. _Naminé_.

"Well," Kairi continued, "it makes me think of the castle in Radiant Garden."

_Hollow Bastion_. And Myde added those names to the growing list of questions he had for Ienzo.

Waving a gentle goodbye to Kairi and reminding her that it was nearly time for breakfast—though she didn't need much of a reminder; she was in her lilac-colored sneakers already—Myde closed the door of the white room behind him. The hallway, with its multitude of colors, shocked him, and for a moment Myde could only stare in wonder, fatigue, desperate curiosity.

_Who is _Naminé_?_ begged the blue door. _Whose name starts with an "A"?_ the green door snickered. And at the end of the hall_ Who… who is _Roxas_? _whispered a black door which Myde had never noticed before.

Without doing anything, the black door caught and wrapped around him, his back, his legs, and pulled, pulled at something inside him. In terror or in awe, Myde felt himself walking down the hallway, his heels squeaking on the waxed floor—but the sound seemed to be coming from miles or hours away.

Myde's eyes felt dry, but he could not blink. When he neared the end of the hallway, his hand lifted of its own accord, trembling as it reached out to touch…

In the middle of the door, outlined in crimson, was a giant, old-fashioned keyhole.

_Mydeee, you can't!_ shouted a voice that was Yuffie's and not, younger and sharper. _The roof of the Gizmo Shop is—_

His fingers stilled, millimeters from the sunken shape in the door, and Myde saw the hairs on the back of his arm stand on end as if he'd been engulfed by static electricity. The door was locked, but…

Myde wondered if he could open it.

_Myde you—_

He reached, intent on closing the distance. His fingers jumped as they made contact with the warm, solid black, and then—the immediate chiming of a clock sent him leaping back from the dark door as if he had been electrified. He head spun to find the source of the sound: an enormous grandfather clock in a niche in the wall, bolted to the floor. Its hands, shapes reminiscent of hearts, read seven on the dot.

"Late!" Myde flinched. There was no time to put off the green room now—he had to slam in a last greeting and get to Aerith's office in about thirty seconds or they'd call Tseng to "deal with him" and there'd be guns and back alleys involved and "No, no, no!"

If he had taken a moment to look back, Myde would have discovered that the black door had vanished.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"—listening, Ienzo?" the defense attorney cuts in to his thoughts, red and gold nails curled around the grey of her jacket at her hip, in his line of vision. It was suddenly strange, an all-consuming sort of oddness, the way her nails are so long, cut square, and red like she's been digging through flesh—the yellow and red colors like insides, like the insides of people's scalps, like…

Ienzo stares forward dully, blinking only when he has to. "Yes," he says finally, though by this time she has already forgotten her question.

"Do you understand what you need to do?"

"Nothing," he offers, with all the interest of one involved in a conversation about weather. He swings his legs idly, the tips of his sneakers squeaking as they brush the floor.

"Not _nothing_." She runs a hand through her side-swept bangs, the dishwater blonde clumping from combined oils of her forehead and palm. "You have to look…" she pauses, "confused."

Ienzo scowls sharply, perhaps the very opposite of what she intends him to express.

"Look, I know I shouldn't counsel you to do this—" she turns her back to him, crossing her arms and speaking more to the closed door than to him, "—but the case is not looking good. We can't do anything to disprove what happened. We have to play every card we can. You're being tried as an adult… do you understand what that means?"

It's a rhetorical question. Ienzo doesn't even formulate an answer; it never occurred to him that he might be tried as anything else.

"If we lose, Ienzo, you'll be sent to jail at the very least. Prison—they could send you to _prison_. We _need_ to win."

_We need…_

_What kind of creatures can live without…_

_We need…_

He follows the flash of memory and for a second forgets she is there. Instead what he sees is black sky lit up by flickering neon; what he feels is the weight of a skyscraper looming, the rain heavy and cold on his back, running down the line of flesh exposed by his torn collar; what he hears is distant screaming, breath breaking the outward rush of noise against the rain beating off-time in his ears; and what he wants is to tell that Bunsen-burning idiot Even to shut up—_just shut up!_—but the words won't come out.

It isn't until the darkness shifts, becomes Braig except not—except _not_ because _oh god there's a bleeding hole in his head but __he's notdying_—that Ienzo realizes Even is not even there, and that the screaming is coming from his own mouth, falling onto the whites of his knuckles, onto his fingertips, clawing at unfamiliar wet road. The sound is harsher, drier than his own voice—_can't be_ but he can feel his vocal chords straining now, so it _must be_—some foreign entity, not part of the—

_Whole? _

"Kid, shut the hell up."And it's Braig's heavy accent, but the face is _wrong_: sharper, colder, open wounds sluggishly bleeding black. Yet even with the jagged lacerations marring his face, the other's rapacious smirk is fully and completely Braig. Where Ienzo expects to feel relief at that, there is only a wide, deep hollow within him.

The rain drags and plasters his hair to his face, and somewhere in the space of the second it takes him to breathe, Ienzo remembers that they've died and he really should have expected this, but there was never any empirical evidence, never—

The creature that is partially Braig shifts, stands, stares out through the rain. "I always figured Hell'd give a warmer welcome."

"_Exactly_ like that!" his defense attorney crows. Ienzo flinches, abruptly ripped back to the courtroom office. For a moment he is disoriented, remembering and forgetting names and faces (_Who is Even? Who is Braig?_) until he can settle his mind on his attorney, her dishwater bangs in her eyes again, out-of-place eagerness on her face. "Just keep that face, right there," she encourages, and without thinking, Ienzo looks over at the long mirror on the wall.

He looks dead. Some time in the last two minutes he's gone pale, making the dark rings under his eyes look like heavy bruising, making the open flare of his eyelids seem sickly wide. He breathes through his mouth—still slightly parted—and rearranges his expression into something less vulnerable, something less childish. His attorney looks disappointed. She leans back, sighing.

"I know it's asking something of you that might be difficult, but the jury needs to see how confused you are. They need to know that you're a person too, that you're not some heartless monster who—"

Ienzo can't help it—he laughs. Quiet and dry, it slithers through the room, folds itself into the dark corners and stills her where she stands. She shrinks, her shoulders falling, her eyes settling somewhere above his head.

"I'm going to do my best, Ienzo, to get you the help you need."

Something in her tone lodges in the back of his throat, bitter and dark. The black amusement leaches away, and he cannot help wondering, all of the sudden, how he looks to her—small even for his age, roughed up by the other boys in the detention center, in the same tie he wore to the spelling bee two months ago…

Weak, he decides. She must think he is lonely, or helpless, dependent upon her to save him. What is irksome is that he is. He is as weak today as that first day, when he stepped into the radiant castle and—and what? The memory slips away from him like vague silhouettes swimming in and out of thick fog in the night. At the very least, Ienzo thinks, he should make an effort. It would be a shame to leave his future completely in her hands. He has no intention of going to prison. But when he turns to the mirror again, reaching for the memory to bring that deathly expression back, he finds it gone, no more than wisps of smoke and neon light. The table in front of him—its empty white plastic face—seems to mock the uncertain tomes of his memory, the words and images being painted in his mind and just as quickly washed away.

He wishes for a marker, suddenly, to fix his transient reality on the untouched surface spread out before him.

Then the phone rings, that old-fashioned, clicking ring. "Hello?" his attorney murmurs, followed by "Yes. Yes. All right." She hangs up, her face melting into a pinched expression. She worries her bottom lip, staining her teeth with cherry lip gloss.

"It's time to go, Ienzo."

She picks up her briefcase, moves to open the door, and holds it for him, tensing up slowly from head to foot. Behind her, the sound of far away voices is held at bay. She glances up and down the hall. He rips himself off the warm leather chair like removing a bandage.

If he pauses on the threshold, under her arm, it is only because standing so quickly has given him vertigo.

"We'll win this," she promises, though he doesn't know why.

And then they are both in the expansive hall, their shadows stretch out for yards in front of them, the tapping of their shoes like drummer boys announcing a firing squad. When they are half way down the hall, the sound of their footsteps is drowned out by the noise of the far away voices rapidly drawing near. Ienzo prepares himself. They turn a corner and the voices become a breaking tidal wave of paparazzi.

Instantaneously, Ienzo is blinded by a volley of camera flashes from the clamoring adults looming over him. His attorney curses under her breath. She throws out her arm (briefcase swinging dangerously) and, for a moment, seems to consider backing up. "Where's the bailiff?" she mutters darkly. "Who let them over the press line?" She steps in front of him to indicate that he should stay still—as if he hadn't figured that out already—and then whips out her cellphone.

"Oblivia, on the Amaryllis case. Where is my security? Whose job was it to handle the media? My client is being hounded." She pauses, listening to a reply. "Are you kidding me? Yeah, thanks a lot." His attorney hangs up without a reply, snapping her cellphone closed with probably more force than she should have.

"Ienzo," she mutters, "we're going to have to tough it out. The bailiff apparently got himself lost two hallways over and is taking his time getting here." Her manufactured smile fades into a vaguely-cherry scowl. "Somebody behind the red tape seems to have forgotten that security usually handles the press _ahead_ of time."

He shrugs. Because reputation means nothing to him anymore, he can't find it himself to care if they photograph him to hell and back. Brushing her bangs aside again with a stiff hand, his attorney steels herself and drags him into the fray.

"Just ignore them completely," she counsels while pushing cameras out of the way left and right—holding her hand and briefcase up alternately, to prevent particularly ambitious photographers from getting close-ups—clearing a tunnel in the crush of bodies barely wide enough for the two of them to traverse single file. Ienzo keeps his eyes closed to avoid the endless strobe effect of the flashes and shakes off his attorney's hand on his shoulder. He is forced to stay close to her, the scent of her perfume and so many people together cloying.

Then suddenly there is sage green and immaculate blonde and metallic blue in front of him, the sum of which is a woman leaning down to look him the eye, the measured smile on her face as desperate as it is inquisitive. She's wearing patched jeans and a shirt two sizes too big, and she's younger than anyone else with a notepad or camera.

"Hello Ienzo," the woman says. "My name is Mariana Cistern, with _Destati_ magazine." Moving away from him and holding off reporters at the front, his attorney does not notice.

"You know," Mariana Cistern is saying, "my son is about your age. If he were in your place, he'd be very scared. Are you scared?"

It doesn't seem like the damaging sort of question his attorney wants him to avoid, so he offers a simple "no", and stares straight ahead. If she is surprised by his answer, it doesn't come through in her voice.

"Then how do you feel about all this? We all want to know. Are you angry at your—"

This is the damaging sort of question his attorney wants to prevent him from answering, but… but he's so sick of this question, so sick of being asked how he _feels_. How many times does he have to say that—

"I'm not feeling anything." He says it a bit too loud; his attorney hears and swoops back on them like an overgrown falcon. She leaps between him and Mariana, training a glare on the journalist.

"You insensitive bit—" she cuts herself off. "Can't you tell he's in shock right now? The last thing he needs is you people turning him into the next biggest scandal!"

"Of course not." Mariana offers a tight-lipped smile. "We're only trying to get to the heart of the story. Many of our readers must be wondering whether something like this could happen to their own families."

His attorney scowls. "My client is not available for comment right now." Without another word she latches on to Ienzo's shoulder and pulls him onward through the crowd. Mariana waves to him—and only him—something like a triumphant smile lingering on her face. Ienzo winces when his arm catches on a camera bag, and his attorney releases him immediately, not stopping to apologize, but proceeding in a far gentler manner afterward.

Belatedly, when they have almost made it to the other end of the swarm of reporters, the bailiff appears. Ienzo has to tilt his head all the way back to see the man's face. The bailiff has an unmistakable bearish quality to his looks: his wide, flat nose is more noticeable than his eyes, which are small and round. A rakish, unconcerned smile lifts his cheeks.

"Well what've we got?"

"Mr. Baloo," Ienzo's attorney sighs, "I should have known it was you."

The bailiff wrinkles his nose for a moment before recognition dawns on him. "'Blivs! When'd you—" A flash goes off in his eyes, and he blinks dumbly for a long moment before his smile falls into a grimace. "Who let the buzzards in?"

"That," Ienzo's attorney sighs again, "would be you." She shakes her head. "Now is not the time to talk—get to work Mr. Baloo."

The bailiff rolls his eyes. "All right, all right," he mutters, miming shoving up his sleeves. "Baaaack up!" Suddenly presented with a much more formidable pair of arms, the journalists nearest to Baloo lean backward. With only a little more struggle and growling, the bailiff clears the area around Ienzo and his attorney.

Their pace quickens and Ienzo breathes easier when his attorney moves away from him, taking the musky scent of her cologne away. The reporters dwindle down to only the persistent few, and between them Ienzo watches Mariana stop to lean against a marble column, a pen in her hand darting across the page of an open notebook. He has absolutely no interest in what she is going to write.

Ienzo, his attorney, and the bailiff cross a line at some point that the press cannot, and then it is only the three of them, clicking their way down blessedly empty, twisting and turning halls. The bailiff lumbers behind Ienzo, and the fifth-grader can feel wondering eyes on his back, as if the bailiff can't quite believe he's escorting a kid to a manslaughter trial. Ienzo ignores him.

He supposes this it the part that, in retrospect, he will claim felt like an eternity in a minute. In reality, it feels exactly as long as it is, an eleven minute walk from one side of a massive building to another. Very simply, without any fanfare, they arrive.

He expected a looming pair of doors, ominous in their aura and taller than three or four of him put together. Instead the bailiff hustles he and his attorney around one last corner and through a nondescript, completely normal doorway. The light changes from natural to halogen for the ten downward steps it takes to reach another nondescript door, and then, without warning, Ienzo is led blinking into the bright lights of the courtroom.

The world goes very still. No one in the large audience breathes.

After a pause he probably would not be able to explain upon questioning, the bailiff leads Ienzo and his attorney to the large defense table, and as Ienzo takes a seat, he realizes the chair is bolted to the floor, just a smidge too far away for him to reach the dark wood table. Along the edge of the table is a scarred metal rail that he can only assume is used to handcuff defendants down.

He settles back onto the cold, wooden chair while his attorney shifts in hers, opening her briefcase and drawing out exhibits. Without really meaning to, he takes a sweeping look around—over the empty bench, the jury box, and then the prosecution's table—where his parents are sitting.

His mother, nearest to him, jerks when he meets her eye—a nervous twitching of her rail-thin wrists—her blue eyes (_but _my_ mother's eyes were grey_) wet with tears that don't affect the rest of her face.

His father (_a stone, a pillar, a monument_) does not so much as blink, his sharp, straight gaze—under the scars—trained on the judge's seat.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

If he had not been rushing, Myde would have stopped in front of the green door and thought about what he was doing. As it stood, he did not take the moment to think, choosing instead to slam his keycard through the lock and throw open the green door. To his credit, he did intend to just shout good morning and slam the door closed again, but… he never got through the "good morning". Kadaj was waiting.

"GOOD MO—"

"Get him."

The next few moments were a blur of silver, white, and small fists that packed more of a punch than they had any right to. After a well-placed shot to his kidneys, Myde dropped to the floor and wriggled into a desperate, protective ball.

"Brothers, let's go!"

Myde gathered himself enough to turn and find Kadaj holding the door open, Myde's key card swinging around his twiggy little finger.

"Oooh!" Myde growled, trying to climb to his feet but stumbling over his too-big non-compliant scrub pants. Kadaj vanished into the hall. "When I catch you, I swear I'm gonna—OW!" Loz kicked him in the shin for good measure. Then both he and Yazoo followed their brother to freedom as Myde struggled to his feet. He straightened his clothes, sucked in a deep breath, and took off running.

"Get back here!" He could hear their footsteps clattering down the hall just around the corner on the right, and followed. Just as he rounded the first corner, a flash of silver rounded yet another bend. Myde cursed the lack of traction in Converse as he skidded around the turn.

The race was winding him, his kidneys were attempting to revolt, but he was catching up: Yazoo's messy ponytail flickered in the light just five doors down, and Myde put on a burst of speed, no slowing down now, not until—

"Whoa, whoa, WHOA!"

—Myde slammed straight into the black-haired man who'd just stepped out of the nearest room. But instead of knocking the stranger off his feet, no, Myde somehow defied several laws of physics to bounce _backward_ and land hard on his tailbone at the man's feet.

_Geez, was this dude's dad a brick wall, or what?_ he groaned to himself.

"Are you okay?"

Myde's eyes darted up to a mostly concerned (but also amused) stare. "Yeah," Myde managed, "but I need to—" He accepted the man's out-stretched hand and ended up being jerked to his feet like a ragdoll. Judging by the enthusiastic smile on the guy's face, he had no idea he was just about tearing Myde's hand off. "Erm thanks," Myde gingerly retrieved his arm, "but I gotta—"

"Myde?" a surprised but familiar voice made its way around the stranger.

"Doctor Gainsborough?" Myde blinked as Aerith came out of the side room too, moving to stand near him.

"You're not at my office?"

"_You're_ not in your office?" …So he wasn't late, then? Myde tried to pretend he wasn't completely confused.

"Ah, no," Aerith shook her head. "I was just about to call the office to let you know I'd gotten a little—" she eyed their hallway companion in a way that made the man flinch and rub the back of his neck in a way that was decidedly sheepish, "—distracted."

"Distract—oh my God, Kadaj got out and he took my key! We've got to catc—"

"Not again," Aerith sighed.

"Trouble?" the stranger perked up. Myde randomly noticed the man was wearing a sleeveless black turtleneck.

_I should introduce him to Cloud. They could trade fashion tips._

"Kadaj and his older brothers," Aerith turned to explain, although Myde thought there was an uncharacteristic hint of exasperation in her voice. "They're impossible to keep—"

"Runaways? No problem!" The stranger's face lit with an exuberant grin as he clenched a glove-clad fist. "Leave it to Zack!" Before Aerith could stop him, he'd gone bounding off. Myde watched with something akin to dumbfound curiosity as "Zack" paused where the hallway T'd, _looking_ left and right in a way that engaged his entire body (Myde would have accused the guy of having a flair for dramatic if it wasn't obvious that he was totally earnest). Zack chose to tear off down the left—only to come racing back after an ominous splashing sound with a soaking wet janitor hot on his heels.

"Okay, they definitely went _this_ way," he pointed, and disappeared immediately down the right fork of the hall.

When the janitor also disappeared a second after, there was a long moment of silence.

"Who…" Myde blinked owlishly.

Aerith only shook her head. "That was Zack. Zack Fair. You wouldn't know it from looking at him, but he's been the acting general of our entire army since the actual general passed away a few years ago."

_You'd know it from running into— _"Wait, a general?" Myde's blinking was traded in favor of an open gape. He looked between Aerith and the vacated end of the hall in disbelief.

"Yep," Aerith smiled (but it looked a little forced; she always had abhorred the thought of war), as if she were used to his type of reaction. "Anyway Myde," she was saying, "I was going to tell you not to worry—someone's already called Tseng. I heard the announcement on the intercom right before you came by. And," she added very belatedly, "Zack's title isn't just for show. He's more trustworthy than he looks."

_Hopefully_, Myde thought dubiously, _a_ lot _more trustworthy_.

Aerith started down the hall without warning. "I rescheduled my first patient for the day, so we have a while. There's…" she paused, a light frown slipping onto her face. "There's something I wanted to talk to you about."

Myde, following a step after her, could see tenseness in the taut line of her shoulders. Aerith was about to put her foot down—and if Myde didn't do something, she was going to put it down on his and Ienzo's (camaraderie? friendship? relationship?) whatever it was they had now. Looking at the steely glint in her eyes, Myde prepared himself for a fight. How to do this? This entire situation was teetering on a crumbling edge. One wrong step and he could lose everything: his internship, all contact with Ienzo, even—if he let just a little too much slip, got too involved—his freedom.

The thought froze him. He had attacked Ienzo when he'd only just learned what he was. He—Myde, pathetic Myde, couldn't-step-on-ants Myde—had shown a propensity for violence. How was he any different from imprisoned Ienzo?

He was standing on a crumbling precipice. One misstep and he could end up in the violet room, taking Ariel's medication, spouting Chester's riddles—

"Myde?" Aerith, ten steps ahead already, turned to look back.

"Sorry," he forced a sheepish grin, "I zoned out for a second." He hurried to catch up to her, wondering exactly what she was planning on telling him, what warnings he was going to get. Had she guessed what sort of things they had talked about yesterday morning? Did she know about the phone call, or this morning, that his greeting to Ienzo—marred as it was by memories for nightmares—had been the only really comfortable one? How could she possibly understand that Ienzo was the only thing that made sense in Myde's world right now and the only being on the entire planet that Myde could share the most important, terrifying, confusing, painful secrets with?

If his future was going to rest on this one conversation, how could he make her understand what it was like to be one of the only two people in the entire world who were not real? Myde didn't know, but he needed a good answer soon.

They reached her office far sooner than he would have liked, and Aerith gestured for him to sit. His chair from yesterday was gone, and the only other place to sit was the patient's loveseat. Myde hesitantly took a seat, wondering if this was deliberate or if the janitor had just decided to take Myde's borrowed chair back to its rightful home. If the missing chair hadn't been deliberate, Aerith did not seem to be in any hurry to retrieve it. She slipped into the seat behind her desk and fixed him with a look—not harsh, never, but concerned, certain, determined to prevent pain and strife. It was like standing before an oncoming flood. He tried not to cower.

"Myde," Aerith started, voice surprisingly light. "It's wonderful that you're becoming involved with the patients." A genuine smile. "I was a little worried that they'd push you around."

He ran with her momentary good humor. "Hey!" he faked offense. But it seemed like the wrong thing to do—her smile slipped away as soon as had it appeared.

"I think it's really wonderful Myde, but… Ienzo is a special case."

"I know," Myde tried, plucking at a loose thread on the couch arm. "That's why I was supposed to be observing him—"

Aerith looked down at her desk. "Myde… that may not be possible anymore. Ienzo is…" She shifted in her chair. "He can be… very persuasive. Even I sometimes…"

Even Doctor Gainsborough? Myde couldn't help but be surprised. If there was anyone among them he would have least connected to Nobodies and otherworldly experiences, it would have been Aerith. Except…

_…the malachite green eyes and artfully twisted brown hair added up in his mind to a stained glass copy of Aerith Gainsborough…_

Except in that dark place, her face had been laid into the great glass window, where part of himself was locked away.

Except…

_"Kairi has created such a strong picture of Sora that—if I hadn't known the truth—even I would believe…"_

Even Doctor Gainsborough.

"Are you saying that I'm going to catch his delusion?" Myde arranged his expression into something like disbelief, and then, to himself, added _Okay, maybe I've caught it already._

"No, I just…" Aerith shook her head, looking up to meet his gaze with a pointed, don't-you-understand look of her own. "Ienzo is an excellent manipulator. He can confuse people and get them thinking and doing what he wants with almost no effort. I don't think…" she bit her lip, "I don't think it would be beneficial to either of you if he convinced you to believe in… unreal things."

Yeah, because "unreal things" were totally capable of vanishing into portals with whole moped parts. Myde had to work very hard to keep from rolling his eyes.

"But I'm not going to just start believing in 'unreal things'," Myde pointed out. The loose thread on the couch frayed and tore out. _I believe in _real_ things. Just because _you've_ never seen them doesn't mean they don't exist. _"Even if Ienzo tries to persuade me, I know what's real and not real." _Sometimes._

"I wish I was so confident," Aerith confessed. "Around Ienzo, it's difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy." Her expression faded into something apologetic. "You've only known him for a few days, so you probably can't understand yet…"

_Except_, Myde thought, _I understand him better than you ever could._

"You don't understand the significance of Demyx." She shifted the papers scattered across her desk to have something to do with her hands.

"'Demyx' is significant?" Myde quickly schooled the shock and interest from his face. He wasn't sure if he desperately wanted to hear what she knew because it was about him, or if he was just possessed by that natural curiosity of what others really thought of him.

"I don't know how much of a chance you have gotten to learn about Ienzo's delusion—" pitifully little, Myde thought, given how important it was to his future "—but Ienzo believes in heartless creatures called Nobodies. Some Nobodies look like monsters, but others look like humans. The human-like Nobodies banded together on a quest to retrieve their lost hearts."

It sounded oddly like the plot of a Final Fantasy game when she put it that way.

"One of Ienzo's companions in this group was a Nobody named Demyx. Obviously something about you has reminded Ienzo of—or is being overlaid onto—the fictional Demyx. Ienzo… believes that you_ are_ Demyx. And he's going to treat you as if you were heartless." Her face was drawn, too disconcerted to be lovely Miss Aerith. She looked suddenly wiser, more wary.

Myde fidgeted in his seat, something deep inside him demanding he explain that he _was_ Demyx, not delusion, but real, living confirmation of Ienzo's sanity. Myde bit the inside of his cheek to keep the words from spilling out.

"If Ienzo does believe that you are Demyx, it could be bad for both of you." She tried to gather herself into something more forceful. "You'll be in an unstable situation which will be made to seem very appealing… and Ienzo will be one step further from realizing that his delusion really is a delusion."

"But Doctor Gainsborough—"

"As your supervisor and the one responsible for your safety in the hospital, I think it would be best if you kept some distance between yourself and Ienzo." She at least had the decency to seem saddened.

"But…" He didn't know what to say. She was absolutely right, by the book: the presence of someone perceived as related to or accomplice in the delusion increased the credibility of the delusion in the eyes of the patient. Extended periods of contact with a patient tended to increase empathy, and therefore acceptance, in the nursing staff. He knew those things, but…

But separating himself from Ienzo now was impossible. Myde refused to be alone in this confusion.

"I know that you're right," he sighed, "but I think that I could do some good with Ienzo." It was, he supposed, the only card he had left to play. Might as well try it.

Aerith blinked. "Good?"

"It kind of seems like he's… lonely, right?" Myde wheedled, balancing concern with a pinch of sadness. It was probably not a positive that he was getting so good at this faking thing. "He seems like the sort of person who pretends like he doesn't need friends because he doesn't have them." Myde's gaze had moved to the window, looking past the green leaves of Aerith's flowering plants as if the sliver of sky he could see between them would summarize Ienzo for him. Because he wasn't looking at her, he missed Aerith's surprise entirely.

"I mean, he seems like he's okay with you and everyone else, but… just being okay with people isn't the same as being friends. If he's always been so alone… I thought… it would be nice if I could just, you know… be there," Myde mused, only half faking it now. So what if Ienzo was alone of his own volition?

Though he barely remembered it, Myde remembered this: even Nobodies gathered.

When he had learned that other worlds existed, Myde had thought—for just a moment—that Dawn City was a tiny world, a shut-in world, a pleasantly-colored prison. But when he thought of himself, when he thought of Ienzo, and when he thought of being Nobodies and being apart, their tiny, shut-in corner of the universe seemed suddenly too vast: an endless forest he was likely to be lost in forever.

If Ienzo was removed, the metaphorical forest of their world would be both endless _and_ empty, words which added up in Myde's head to a single sum: _intolerable_.

He forced himself back into the conversation just as Aerith was beginning to notice his silence, turning away from the window to meet her eyes. "I think it would be good if Ienzo had someone to talk to… and if he thinks I'm someone he used to know, then he'll probably be comfortable talking to me, right?" People were naturally more comfortable around those who didn't accuse them of being completely insane, Myde figured.

For a moment longer, Aerith tried to maintain her stern disposition, but it had never suited her in the first place, and within seconds, the look crumbled away to just _Aerith_, not Doctor Gainsborough but just the woman who desperately wanted to brighten the lives of everyone around her.

"I do wish that he… He does need…" she mumbled, teetering on the edge of giving up.

Aerith really was amazing, Myde thought, followed by the much less mature _Oh yeah, I just won this_. He couldn't keep from imagining it as a dead serious poker game (not that he was any good at poker in reality, but this was his imagination, so…) where he was far ahead of his opponent—with a Royal Flush still in his hand.

"And…" he leaned in a little, lowered his voice as if he was afraid of someone overhearing, "and Ienzo thinks of me as part of his delusion, so he'll talk about it with me, right? He'll probably tell me things that he's never told anyone else."

What lingered very purposefully in the air for Aerith was _Things that might help cure him_.

What Myde thought was _Not that I'd rat him out_.

The widening of her eyes, the slight slackness of her jaw meant that Aerith had not thought of it that way—had not, in her infinite kindness, thought of _using_ Myde to get to Ienzo, the one she had never made progress with, the one she was so far from saving…

A week ago, Myde would have seen it as cruel to get her hopes up like this. But now, perhaps a little tainted by darkness, nothingness, or even just by Ienzo, the twinge of guilt Myde felt was gone as soon as it had come. What replaced it was something like pride, like—_for once_, though he wasn't sure where _that_ notion came from—he'd completed a mission without wavering.

"If you let me talk to him, I might be able to help Ienzo sort out what's real and what isn't," he said.

That closed it, summary and suggestion all at once, and when Aerith said "I'll talk to Doctor Yen Sid about it," Myde took it as a green light.

He was surprised by the genuine relief that made its way through him, loosening muscles he hadn't even known were tensed and taking his teeth off edge, and then even more by the sudden awkward silence that occurred while Aerith turned over his idea and its implications in her head.

"Sooo…" he threw out in an anxious effort to alleviate the tension, "that Zack guy is your friend, right?" Trying for a sly grin (though it probably just came across as supremely dorky), he added, "Is he your boyfriend?"

Aerith was surprisingly quick to shake her head, brown curls bouncing into her face. For a second Myde thought he saw a flash of something that was… not quite nostalgia and not quite aversion, but something in between, like a wish met with irreconcilable obstacles. Or something like that. He wasn't sure what to make of it, wasn't even sure people could feel that collection of emotions all at once (but he wasn't really in a place to judge)…

"Oh no," Aerith said, and it was part wistful but mostly insistent, "we discovered early on that the things we wanted were too different. He's… aiming for the sky, you know?" Whatever reminiscence Myde thought he had detected seemed far away when Aerith giggled like that, like it was nostalgia for a fond memory but nothing more.

He didn't really know what she was talking about, but he nodded anyway. It seemed like the right thing to do.

"And really," she shook her head again and smiled, "Zack's just a little too—"

There was an abrupt, firm rap on her office door before it was flung open, and Tseng, a fistful of black turtleneck in one hand, dragged Zack (who appeared to be firmly engaged in some sort of sissy slap war with an incensed Kadaj) into the middle of Aerith's office.

"Does this," the security guard intoned, "belong to you?"

Although Aerith was never able to finish her "he's a little too" statement, Myde thought he got the picture.

…Was that Loz hanging off Zack's ankle by his teeth? And _what_, Myde gawked once he'd had a chance to look around the two taller men, in the _world_ had happened to Yazoo's hair?

"Um," a cheery voice filtered into the room from outside in the hall, "am I early?" A short girl with very flippy brown hair—Doctor Gainsborough's next patient for sure—peeked around the doorframe into the crowded office.

Aerith simply sighed.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The ice pack is cold and hard through the paper towel when he holds it against the right side of his face. He shifts it so its brick-like shape rests on the rise of his cheek and eyebrow, a cold blue and white blur over an eye it hurts to close.

"Ienzo, you have to tell me what happened," the principal is calling him from the space above her computer monitor, in a voice lost somewhere between stern and comforting.

"I… don't know," he mumbles, feeling the crack in his lip catch on his teeth. Through the strands of hair spilling, disheveled, over his face, he can see the principal looking down at him, with a look he doesn't know how to describe. Sad, maybe?

"We called your mother. She's on her way."

But she has to take a taxi when his father isn't home, so it will take a while. He moves the ice pack even though it hurts.

"Do you want me to call the counselor? Do you think you could talk to him?"

"I don't know." He hadn't been talking?

She leans back in her chair, one hand tapping the space bar on her keyboard idly. She doesn't go to get the counselor. "I need to know what happened and who did it."

"They hit me," he says, feeling the irritating sensation of blood drying in his nose.

"Who did?"

"I don't know." He's said that before, so he adds, "I don't know them."

She sighs, taps hard enough on the keyboard to push down a few keys. "What did they look like?"

He doesn't know—he hadn't really been seeing anything until there was a fist against the bridge of his nose, and then there'd been just a sparking sort of pain and black spots filling his eyes. But he doesn't want to keep saying the same thing, so he says nothing.

The principal looks down over the monitor of her computer expectantly, until it is clear he is not going to answer, and then she leans back again until the only thing he can see are her eyes, dark enough brown to look black.

"Why would anyone want to hit you, Ienzo?" she asks.

_I don't know._ "They said I was staring." He shifts in the old, unclean office chair until the arm of the chair is supporting the elbow of his arm holding the ice pack.

She blinks slowly. "Staring?"

"At them," he adds.

"Were you staring?" The way she says it makes it sound okay, makes sure he doesn't think staring is a good reason to hit someone.

"I didn't mean to. I was thinking."

"About?"

_Backwards waterfalls and glittering streets, some place like Heaven_. But that's stupid, so he doesn't answer, and she drops that line almost as soon as she brings it up.

"Did they say anything else?"

"That I was weird." He reads the writing impressed into the ice pack instead of looking at her face.

"…They weren't from your class."

_I don't know._ He doesn't answer.

"Did you try to defend yourself?" Again, her voice is encouraging.

"No," he says. He knew that was what you were supposed to do when someone hit you—push them away or make yourself small or scream for help, but those were things you did when you were scared, and he hadn't felt—

He hadn't felt?

"Do you know why they stopped then? Mr. McKellen said there wasn't anyone around when he found you. Did another teacher maybe see them or come near?" She is thinking someone was a witness, someone she can actually get answers from. He wants to be helpful.

"One of them said my father was the lieutenant governor." He slows down to say it correctly, lieu-ten-ant, and in his head he spells it L-I-E-U-T-E-N-A-N-T, because the National Spelling Bee is in three days and he wants to win. "And then they stopped."

For a long moment, she is silent, a pair of eyes between a black computer and salt and peppering brunette hair. "Are you feeling all right, Ienzo?"

"My eye hurts."

"I mean your feelings. The last time I saw you—" she had been awarding him the principal's honor roll award "—you were much more talkative."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm going to get the counselor." She slides out of her rolling chair and toward the door in a series of too-smooth motions, and he can't help but think that confirms their suspicions that she's really some sort of ghost or witch in disguise. Alone in the office, he stares at the plaques lining the wall in front of him, letters too small for him to read with his eyes blurry like they are. Excellence. He can read that one. E-X-C-E-L-L-E-N-C-E.

Then the principal is gliding back, the counselor slouching behind her. The counselor is tall, old, sort of fat, his beard like a spiky animal glued to his face. He is always smiling, but most of the time no one can see it under his moustache.

"Ienzo Amaryllis. It's nice to see you again." The last time they saw each other, the counselor had loaded his backpack so full of college pamphlets Ienzo's shoulders had hurt. Something about _never being too early_.

"Nice to see you too," he says, the practiced response his parents have ingrained in him.

"Principal Lovitz wanted me to come talk to you about what happened. I can tell from that frown on your face that you probably don't want to talk about it—" he's frowning? "—but we almost always feel better if we tell other people about the bad things that happen to us."

Ienzo stays quiet, not sure what they are expecting him to say. The principal is back behind her desk again; the counselor stands over Ienzo like a wide, long shadow.

"Why don't you tell me what happened?" The counselor's voice is not the principal's—she supports, he cajoles.

"Some other kids hit me." Ienzo moves the ice pack so it obscures the counselor almost completely.

"Did that make you angry?"

"I don't know."

The counselor rocks back on his heels. "You don't know? What do you mean by that? Do you mean you can't remember what you were feeling at that moment?"

"I don't know." He can't remember feeling angry when they hit him.

He can't _ever_ remember feeling angry.

He remembers yelling, he remembers stamping his feet and pushing things and crying, but when he looks for the feelings behind those actions there is no answer from the depths of his head. He remembers being angry, but not what it feels like to be angry.

Something is wrong.

"But it made you scared, didn't it?" the counselor wheedles.

He remembers hiding under the covers, shrinking back from a wasp, cowering when his father reviews his school marks.

"I don't know."

"It's okay to be scared Ienzo. It's okay to admit that you were scared. Don't you think you'd feel better if you talked freely about your feelings?"

He doesn't remember. Anything. Nothing.

"I don't know."

"So you don't think talking about it will help?" It's the principal this time, eyes dark over her computer.

"I don't know." How many times will he have to say it before they understand? He can't answer questions he doesn't know the answers to, can't solve the problem if he doesn't know what the problem _is_, can't define something he cannot remember ever having a definition for.

What is anger? What is fear? He is sure a book could remind him, but they want an answer from him now and there's no time to look it up, and he's already checked out too many library books, but how can they expect—

"Are you sure you're not angry or afraid Ienzo?"

"I don't know!" He doesn't mean to yell but it's not fair that they want him to answer; he hates surprise quizzes, can't spell it if they won't use it in a sentence—"I don't remember!"

The adults stare at each other shortly. "The nurse said he didn't have a concussion," the principal insists.

He just _doesn't_ remember how to feel. There is something wrong.

"I don't know," he repeats, feeling tears stinging at the edges of his eyes—angry tears, but the frustration is a far away echo. They don't understand; he can't—

"Ienzo!"

His mother is framed in the doorway, a cascade of blue hair, a pixie face, her long skirt swilling behind her in the dim of the hallway. She rushes into the room, bent to his level already, reaching out—and for second he stares in abject shock, filling with the shadow of every shade of fear and anger.

For a second she is not his mother. She is an alien, a monster in the skin of his mother, a thin, fake replication.

He jerks back from her hand.

"Ienzo?" She reaches out again and holds him because there is no further back he can go. Her arms slip around him; the warm skin of her neck touches his cheek. "What happened, what happened to you? Who did this?"

He shivers.

But then suddenly it is over, the scent of her—_water and flowers_—very much the smell he knows is his mother, the blue of her hair filling his uncovered eye.

"Mother?" Her hug is hurting him, but he doesn't tell her that.

She lets go, leans back to look at him, tracing the bruise already forming around his right eye very lightly.

"Who did this?" But she's talking to the principal.

"We don't know. He didn't see them. We'll hold an assembly and ask anyone who knows anything about it to come in. Of course, the moment we find out more, I'll let you know." The principal stands; the counselor steps back to make room for her to pass. "In the mean time, I think you should take Ienzo to the hospital today. The school nurse said he didn't have any serious head injury, but when we tried to talk him about what happened, his answers were odd."

"Odd?" Ienzo's mother asks.

"It just didn't seem like he understood what we were asking," the counselor offers, congenial, reassuring smile in place. "He's having a hard time sorting out what happened."

His mother moves her hand from his face to his shoulder, tightening gently.

"The secretary in the main office has a sign-out book. I think it would be best to take Ienzo out of school for the rest of today at least."

"Of course," his mother murmurs. "Come on Ienzo. We'll take you to see the doctor right now."

He stands, the motion making him momentarily dizzy. She catches him, holds him flush against her side in the folds of her skirt. Half carrying him, she moves out of the office.

In the dim hallway, it comes to him.

"Did your eyes used to be grey, Mother?"

She looks down at him, her gaze as blue as his. "No," she says, slowly. "Why would you ask that?"

_My mother's eyes were grey._

"I don't know."

Something is very wrong.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

From the stand, his father stares out across the courtroom without staring at anyone in particular, a heavy general glare that sets everyone behind the bar—and more than a few in front of it—on edge. Ienzo's attorney shifts stiffly in her seat, hands clenched into fists over her notes.

Ienzo stares back. But his stare is analytical, possessed by disbelief, a sudden disengaged wonder, as if he is seeing the person on the stand for the first time. This person is his father, but Ienzo sees none of this man—gunmetal grey hair, hooded hazel eyes, a tall and persevering build—in himself. They are strangers, but by blood, enemies by relation, two opposing forces unfortunate enough to have been locked in the same small world, household.

Ienzo had wanted to be just like him. Now he counts the waxy lines of scar tissue from one eyebrow into the jagged line of his father's hair with something that threatens to be satisfaction.

"Mr. Amaryllis," the prosecutor paces easily before the stand, "let's begin by establishing some facts for the court. What is your relation to the defendant?"

Ienzo almost expects him to say they have none. But the man, stare unchanged, unblinking, merely inclines his head—as if recognizing the question as beneath him, but deigning to answer anyway.

"He's my son."

"And you are the sole provider for your family?" The prosecutor queries in the voice of someone asking superfluous questions to a serious end; Ienzo wonders what argument is starting here.

"Yes," his father deigns to answer again. "There's no need for my wife to work."

"What you are saying, Mr. Amaryllis, is that the defendant, Ienzo, is dependant solely upon you and has been for all his life. And yet, may I ask, has he ever shown particular gratitude for your continued support?"

"Objection your honor—my client is eleven years old. I would ask that any members of the jury who are parents consider the levels of gratitude their own children displayed at eleven. Furthermore, what is the relevance of this line of questioning? The sincerity of familial relations between my client and his father has little to do with the event in question." Ienzo's attorney clicks the nails of one hand against the tabletop.

"Your honor," the prosecutor simpers, "I am making a point here."

"Objection dismissed. However, please make your point with expediency, Mr. Nox," the judge drones, black sleeves and thin arms crossed over the bench.

"Of course your honor." The prosecutor turns back to Ienzo's father. "You would say, then, that despite your support, your relationship to your son has always been strained?"

For a moment, Ienzo's father weighs the question, deciding it benefits him. "Yes," he says.

"And why do you think that is?"

If his father pauses, it is not to think so much as to judge. His lips set into a sharp line. "Ienzo was always a withdrawn child. He wanted to be left alone."

What Ienzo cannot stop himself from thinking is _Because you told me that was… _

"So you would say that Ienzo was somewhat… self-consumed—that his attention lay, from the very start, only on himself?"

Ienzo bites the inside of his cheek to keep from scowling.

"Yes. He chose to live in his own world."

"Essentially, Ienzo has always preferred to act as if he were not a member of your family."

_What family?_

"Yes," Ienzo's father intones. The prosecutor sweeps a meaningful look over the jury. "With that in mind, please tell the court what happened at 6:00 p.m. on December 13th."

Ienzo stops listening, turns his thoughts into the blank space of his mind where, splayed across vast whiteness is the shrieking, tearing, howling of a thousand memories crushed into a single moment, into—

blurs like light through a far-away stain glass window, and he sits on living room floor in his school clothes wondering if he is going _to the castle _blind, except the problem is not his eyes _grey is a weird color kid as if yellow is any less_ but his head, because something is seriously wrong with _you kid I mean live a little_ him but he doesn't know exactly what.

He is pounding: his head, his heart, his blood and _the dark yes always that like an extra liter or so of pollution bubbling up inside you like gas growing up in dead things yes your imagery is as lovely as ever xigbar_ he worries for a moment that he is going to die. Dying feels like this _and you would know_.

The floor beneath him swims _weve got an atlantica mission yesssss its gonna be so much fun dont you think no I dont think I find that world at best frivolous but you get to be a shark_ a sea of green and red blurs that he remembers are puzzle pieces, strewn and ready to be put back together for the _third time vexen i dont know where the specimen went i wasnt watching it go ask lexaeus_ fourth time. His fifth-grader hands are tiny round circles of white, splashing out into the field of brown hardwood flooring.

He tries to breathe slowly but _the stinking reeking feet are stepping on his throat_ he chokes and collapses, face against the cool _rain down his back_ floorboards, sticking where sweat and polish meet, watching the blue that is his mother moving around in the _market square _dining room.

What's wrong with me? z_exion ienzo_

What's happening to me? z_exion ienzo_

Who…

_you are not i am not you are not i am not_

And he still can't see right, and very suddenly he is not himself _define _himself_ please im beginning to think we think of it differently _himself_ is _himself_ is me_

Who is _me_?

"Ienzo!" the blue that is (_his_?) mother moves too quickly, like a

_heartless, aggressive little bastards too do keep your eye open good sir i have two eyes i suppose if thats how youd like to see it_

monster. He jerks away from the pale white blurs of her snatching hands and she freezes with all the timidity of a woman too tame to pick a husband on her own, to lay claim to anything but the blue of Ienzo's eyes which is all wrong, which is all wrong, he thinks, because she is not (_his_?) mother

_grey eyes and when father is not there loud laughter and quiet smiles a sort of hidden affection that is partly of (his?) making so that father will not think less of (him?) grey eyes and forever the scent of water in her untamed hair when they ran through the cobblestone streets protecting flowers she bought from the flower girl to put on fathers desk_

No, not _his_ mother. But his?

The blurred white column of her arm reaches out again. He backs away, choking on the innate, inexplicable, horrible sense that they are not meant to be connected, that they are

_watching ants go by and watching and watching and sometimes i wonder what its like to be an ant but im not and i dont want to be except sometimes once in a while i do is that weird i heard somewhere that ants are all the same with the same thoughts and the same feelings but were not the same are we even to even to that person im not the same and sometimes i think were supposed to be but sometimes i dont like wanting to be an ant mindless_ and_ arent you a little too young for allegory_

two different species, that if she closes the distance she could

_close the door_

wipe clear the lines of his memory until there is only_ in the absence of resistance stones and feathers fall compendium spelled C-O-M-P-E-N-D-I-U-M_ but what he does not understand is why he does not want that to happen, and it is in that moment that she calls again "What's wrong, Ienzo? Please!" and he realizes that he is not.

Not human. Not one person. Not _Ienzo_, but Ienzo, but… **Zexion**.

All the windows of all the worlds shatter, a glittering infinity humming, singing, shrieking in the watery dark to the time of the breath of the universe. Corridors open and close. Darkness knocks on the door. And what he knows is what he is:

an archive of the spaces between—

a tendril of smoke and night clawing at the gap beneath the door—

a long line of lives with no meaning—

a made-up name—

a traitor—

a Nobody.

_Therefore, it is possible to stipulate that some sociopaths, marginalized and labeled by society as "nobodies", are not biological but metaphysical phenomena. If that indescribable matter which acts upon personal morality, which manifests generosity and pet peeves, affection and dislike—if that indescribable matter which is so often referred to as the heart is nonessential to life, then it is entirely possible that heartless beings may walk among us today, who are, for all intents and purposes, human in construction, yet diametrically different in their most basic desires. Where human beings naturally seek to survive, heartless beings naturally seek to become complete._

_- The Lexicon of Modern Psychology, 1999_

"Please Ienzo!" then Zexion…

_I not I Kingdom Xemnas I not being Hearts worlds whole not I Xigbar Radiant not sparkling Darkness Nobody Xaldin I where Garden where City I not Vexen where where Never Was _

Then the wet, heated floorboards of his house in Dawn City under his sweating temple and palms are the wet, dark pavement of the World That Never Was, and the rain pours down over the back of the eleven-year-old body that is his and not his, and under the torn collar of the shirt, stinging unbearably when it drips along the claw marks that have broken his collar bone.

_not I Heartless Nobody Darkness Radiant not I heartless not I Lexaeus corridors Kingdom Dusk Ansem Ansem not I betrayer not I where Number heartless Saïx Hearts one two Bailey three four five not I_

The oddest thing is that he can still feel his fingers clawing at the asphalt (pain, still pain), but instead of blood there are tendrils of smoke, as if the rain were acid, as if he is nothing more than dark ash, drifting. In his mouth, the taste of ash and nothingness replaces blood from a bitten lip, a bitten tongue, a bitten cheek.

Everywhere there are yellow eyes in the darkness, appearing and disappearing like strobe lights.

_heartless seven Axel eight Ansem Radiant not I Memory's who welcome Organization why none Skyscraper Demyx Hell nine not I heartless not I basement experiment Luxord yellow eyes ten alleys_

He tries to brush his hair from his eyes with the hand that works better, but they're bangs now, meant to be where they are, and he doesn't understand anything except for the fact that he wants to scream and scream and scream from pain, but not from rage or fear. He doesn't scream, not even when he realizes that the creature that is and is not Braig has left him alone in the never-ending city, in the neon lights blurred like fireworks to his half-covered gaze.

He is dead or not dead, and what he remembers most clearly is—

Claws. Hands. Red. Claws. Yellow eyes. Darkness moving against his skin.

_basement why betrayer not I where heartless why Marluxia Oblivion Destiny shadows betrayer betrayer Oblivion memories end none Hell eleven Larxene twelve grey eyes Rising shadows Nobody shadows memories heartless not I Falls Thirteen Roxas _

Being torn open.

And suddenly the rain is colder, colder than he can bear, and he feels the whole world stilling, the watching eyes stop moving, all sound ceasing except for a sound that he wants—needs, needs—to hear but cannot.

His good hand is shaking when he lifts it to the ragged, soppy edges of his shirt, shaking hot against his chest when his fingers brush the hole in the fabric, the hole in…

_not I heartless not I heartless not I Ienzo not I six not I six six not I _Zexion_._

His fingers slid unobstructed through the gaping fissure between his cracked ribs, and beneath his fingertips he feels the pumping of a hollow organ, slick and rubbery like Heartless flesh.

Belatedly, there is agony.

Ienzo screams. He is on his feet in the living room in Dawn City without knowing how he got there, backed up against the bookcase with the blue of not-his mother desperate in front of him.

"Ienzo, _please_, what is _wrong_?" Her voice barely carries above his unbroken howling.

_Myheartwhere notIheartlesswhere myheartwhere—_

"Hush, hush—your father is trying to—"

_Wherewhywhere notIheartless wheremyheartwhere—_

"What is he screaming about?" Ienzo's father—grey, only grey and black and white like nothing real or living—stands in the doorway to the hall, discreetly against the frame, the flu settling like a blanket around his shoulders, under his deep-set eyes.

_Whereismyheart whereismy where myheartmyheartmy—_

"I don't know," the blue shudders over his screaming, "I don't know! He won't let me touch him!"

His voice breaks into an explosion of coughing, rasping, breaths drawn like blood from too-thin veins, but all he hears is—but all he feels is—

_Emptybrokenempty emptyempty brokennotI brokenemptyI—where is my heart?_

The grey and black and white is in front of him filling the canvas of his vision over a double exposed background—a minimalist living room—a neon city—and all he hears is "What are you screaming at Nothing for?"

_IhavetofinditIhavetofindit!_

And then suddenly it is all very cold.

He screaming dies sharply, no echo. His fists unclench, everything goes from him in a second's time, until inside him there is only sentence repeating:

"I have to find it," he says.

"What did you—"

Ienzo straightens to his full height of the man's sixth rib, staring out beneath the haphazard strands of hair plastered to his face by drying sweat. "I have to find it." His father is nothing before him.

_Findsearchconsumefind. Take._

"Move out of my way." If it is his voice, Ienzo does not recognize it: the caustic tone, the measured confidence anything but Ienzo's, but it came from his mouth and therefore it is (and is not) a part of him in ways he doesn't understand and no longer cares about figuring out.

Very neatly he folds twenty-one years of foreign memories up in a veil, in a white cloth, and buries them, for the moment, in the bottom of his mind where they can no longer interfere with the primal knowledge, with the ingrained, omnipotent instinct demanding that he leave the world now, that he _findstealfind_ his heart with no option for denial.

"I have to go find it." He cannot choose to stay. He would not choose to stay. "Don't stand in my way."

"What are you talking about?" the grey snaps. "Your mother doesn't find this funny."

He says nothing, thinks nothing except that this is all too slow, all these blurs of colors taking time, taking breaths, taking everything from him. Someone inside him cannot abide it, pushes against the walls of the watery dark, wishes, wishes for a weapon, for _the_ weapon, for the pulse of information, the shapes of letters, the smell of glue and wood pulp—his small hands are behind him on the bookshelf, searching.

"If you don't move, I'll make you."

A laughing cough. "You're out of your mind. You're not going anywhere."

"Don't stand in my way!"

"Don't raise your voice to me."

_Ihavetofindit Ihavetofindit Ihavetofindit_—"Let me go!"

"The only place you're going is over my knee."

His fingers close over it at last, a spine almost too big for his fifth grade hands to close around, but he manages, pulls it from the shelf behind him—and it's effortless; it should be near impossible to lift it with this body, but adrenalin or Zexion or Nothing makes it possible—and the book is in his hands, 1600 pages black leather-bound, the corners of the covers tipped with bronze, a collection of Shakespeare in the form of the Shade Archive without (_his_?) number on it, and for a moment his arms hum as if brushed by tendrils of Darkness, and the massive book seems to float in his hand, a world of signifiers and signified and symbols and data and illusion on paper at his command.

For a moment he is very sure of who he is (isn't) and it is in that moment that he stabs the book into the grey of not-his father's stomach, the metal corners digging through the thin shirt to flesh beneath. Unprepared, weakened by illness, the man doubles over, his head level with Ienzo's now, and the blue is screaming like a wounded dog—

"Ienzo! Ienzo!"

_Ihavetofindit Ihavetofindit Ihavetofindit—_

He gives the man no time to stand up again, lifts the book as high as he can and brings it down with a visceral_ thkkh_ on not-his father's forehead, metal and leather and pages more than the weight of a brick against thin muscle and bone and in its wake blood begins to well up—

And again. Screaming. "Ienzo!" And again. Again. Screaming. "No! No!"

Not-his father is on the floor, but still he cannot stop, as if rage were driving him—but it is _not_, it is something more terrible than rage, impossible to cool, impossible to fill or stopper or end except by finding what is lost, but this man tried to—this man tried to keep him from his heart. This man wants to hold him prisoner here where his heart is not, wants to keep him _heartless_.

_Ihavetofindit_—

The gunmetal grey is red and white and yellow fat tissue, the pulpy inside of scalp outside, lines of blows, spaced as if like claws—as if like claws, and he…

Ienzo drops the book—just a book, a book, not the lexicon—turns, his vision beginning to clear, beginning to change colors back to human beings, and when he turns he finds (_his?_) mother on the floor in the shape of an unborn infant, moaning in terror or agony or merely at her own inability to act, at her blind dependence to the man bleeding out on the floor.

"No… Ienzo… No… Please… No… Please… Don't… Ienzo…"

He wipes a bloody hand on his school uniform shirt and walks to the front door.

Behind him the woman keeps shaking, choking on "Why?"

He shuts the front door carefully behind himself, squinting into the setting sun which turns him blind again, and when the next door neighbor accosts him at the end of their driveway—"Ienzo, honey, I heard screaming; what's going on—"—he says nothing, steps around her, he and _he_ and **he** too involved in compressing the universe, the years, the power, the emptiness into something that will not destroy them.

All his world is the dominion of Darkness and death.

_Where is my heart? Where is my heart? Where is my heart?_

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde knew he shouldn't push Aerith's generosity by going to visit so soon, but she hadn't told him he couldn't, and he'd read those hospital procedures—there was nothing about off-hours interns not being allowed to visit patients during valid visiting hours. (He was fairly sure Ienzo was a special case with a special set of rules, but they'd never given him anything to read about that, so it couldn't be his fault if he made a mistake.) He didn't have a reason for wanting to visit except that their meeting earlier—when Ienzo had looked sick and frightened—had made him… nervous? He scuffed his sneaker on the elevator floor, filling up empty air both in and out of his head. Myde didn't know how to describe what he was feeling (hadn't really known how to describe feelings even when he'd been a hundred percent sure he actually had them) or why it made him worry about Ienzo being alone all of today. Nobody that shaky should have been left alone, but no one else had even noticed…

The elevator dinged and opened too early, and Myde jumped the gap rather than bothering to wait. Just three days ago this hallway had terrified him, but now the dim navy and surreal portraits seemed boring, tame, only a prelude to the real magic and shock of the violet room.

He reached the door to Ienzo's room and knocked out of courtesy. After a long second, there was a sound on the other side of the heavy door that might have been "Come in"—if it wasn't, well… Myde was going to come in anyway. He unlocked the door (his keycard had been rescued by Tseng that morning, and _ugh_, hadn't that been the most nerve-wracking thing, asking for it back) and peeked into the room.

There was no one to be seen. The bed had been made fastidiously some time during the day.

"Ienzo?" Myde took a step into the room and leaned to look around the door. "Ienzo?"

Across the dimly-lit room, a marker-smudged hand appeared over the line of the bed. "Here."

Myde hopped-stepped-jumped to the far wall, blinking when he discovered Ienzo sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning almost completely over to his left, one hand holding his hair out of his eyes, and the other pressing a Sharpie against the wall. New words on the violet face—still glistening wet—trailed down to Ienzo's place on the floor. Myde didn't feel right looking at them (the temptation to read was almost unbearable), but every time he tried to look away, he ended up spotting words without wanting to. Like "where"—it stood out just above Ienzo's head, in double-thick capital letters.

Myde looked down at Ienzo and resolutely not at anything else. "So… you're writing?"

Ienzo turned his head, one eyebrow cocked. Though he didn't say anything, _Did you honestly just ask me that?_ echoed in the room.

"Erm, I meant do you like writing?" Myde rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. Ienzo turned back to the wall but held the marker away from it. Whether he was reading over what he'd written or just staring into space, Myde couldn't tell.

After a moment, Ienzo shrugged noncommittally. "I suppose."

"You _suppose_?" Myde tilted his head. "Why would you write so much if you didn't like writing?"

There was another moment before Ienzo shrugged again, sitting up and straightening his hair almost self-consciously. "It's the easiest and most familiar way for me to organize things."

Myde was going to ask Ienzo what he was trying to "organize" with all those words on the walls, but before he could, Ienzo continued.

"Writing was my responsibility when we were with the Organization."

"Really? Like reports and stuff?" Myde leaned against the wall without thinking, not noticing when Ienzo crushed the urge to cringe—smudged writing had always, always bothered him. "So… you were like the Organization's secretary?"

"An _archivist_, not a secretary." Ienzo glared so fiercely Myde threw up both hands in defense, but then...

"Sure thing—" Myde smirked, "—Mr. Secretaryyy."

Ienzo pulled back a fist and punched Myde straight on his nearest shin.

"Ow!" the intern clutched his wounded leg. "Why the violence?" For a second following his words, Myde thought he saw a flash something scared and young and lost on Ienzo's face, but it was gone immediately, swept away by evident self-satisfaction.

"You deserved it," Ienzo said, the cant of his lips belying amusement.

"Maybe," Myde agreed, catching himself grinning. Then, groaning about the intense agony in his injured leg, Myde moved to drag the teal chair right next to where Ienzo was sitting. He threw himself down in it with an exaggerated sigh, unable himself to explain his sudden childish energy.

"What are you here for, anyway?" Ienzo muttered, not bothering to look up at Myde.

"Can't I just be here?"

Ienzo said nothing in reply.

For a long while they sat in a comfortable silence, odd, considering they were mostly strangers rather than friends and Myde could not even remember the part about them being comrades. Ienzo did not go back to writing on the wall, but he didn't look away from it either, choosing to re-read the words and twirl the Sharpie idly in one hand. Myde watched the slow and even passage of the sunset against the far wall. For some reason, he thought, the light seemed warmer in the room than it ever had before.

"This morning…" Myde mused, disturbing the long silence like dropping a stone into a pond, "Ummm, this morning I was thinking about telling you…"

Ienzo looked up at him with a face that expected nothing life-changing.

"But maybe I won't because it's really stupid and you'll probably just make fun of me and I'm sure you won't care about it so it's probably best just not to say anything, but—" Myde felt his face turning red in stages.

"It can't be any more annoying than your babbling."

Myde looked away, toward the red light blinking on the doorknob. "Sorry."

Silence stretched on for a moment before Ienzo sighed quietly from exasperation. "Just tell me."

Myde flinched. "Well… I just… I wanted to say that I… I believe you." He felt more than saw Ienzo freeze. "The stuff you've been telling me… about Nobodies… and about us... I'm not sure I understand it all, and there're are some parts that I don't really agree with—and I get the feeling that I maybe never did—but… the Organization and Nothings and Zexion and, and Demyx… I don't think you're crazy. I don't think you're deluded."

He worked up the courage to look down at Ienzo, only to find the other had curled in on himself, the marker very still between smudged fingers.

"I believe you, Ienzo."

To the violet wall, Ienzo murmured, "You're the only person in the world who does." It sounded a lot like _Thank you_.

Myde went back to watching dusk fall on their calm silence, keenly aware of Ienzo's side pressed warm against the leg of the chair.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ëηŧŗăŧā – Äđāġίσ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Final Mix:

**1) On mental breakdowns:** If you had a ton of trouble reading Ienzo's later section, try reading all the normal text first, and then going back to read the text in italics.

**2) Trivia Time!**

_Last chapter's trivia: _Vincent's story was based upon (and totally stole lines from) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T. S. Eliot. I'm surprised more people didn't get that one! The foreign phrase that is both song and book title was "Danse Macabre"—I was surprised so many people got this.

_**New trivia! **_The title of this chapter can be found in a different form in Kingdom Hearts I—do you know where? And: Ienzo's breakdown was written in imitation of a famous work of fiction from the American South, first published in 1929. Which work? 5000 cool points if you can name the character who employs this neurotic, stream-of-conscious style. (Hint: the quote at the beginning of the chapter is by the same author!)

**3) ****As always, my full and undying gratitude goes to DG**, who is probably the most patient person in the whole world. About everything. (DG's Note: …It's because I went through so many years with dial-up internet…XD)

**Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alerts list!**


	7. Glittering Generality

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ III_

Vąłžεŗ – Đεłłε – Ǿ ŗ ε – ( Äłłεġŗσ ) :

Ģłίŧŧεŗίηġ – Ğεηεŗąłίŧγ

This chapter is dedicated to This Charade and Cosmos of the Sun.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Three weeks later, Myde was sitting on the floor of the violet room (more violet now than he had ever seen it, and smelling harshly of a fresh coat of paint) listening to Ienzo say, "The only copy is in Yen Sid's office, and he refuses to lend it to me. It would be 'too much of a privilege,' he says." The sarcasm was painfully evident, but...

"Um, what are we talking about again?"

From where he was leaning against the wall, Sharpie still in his hand, Ienzo stared for a moment, frowned, and then sighed as if he'd been expecting a comment like that all along.

Well it wasn't Myde's fault! Ienzo could be totally distracting, especially when he wasn't trying to be. When he wasn't thinking about it, Ienzo didn't move like a human being at all. Or at least, it didn't look human—Myde couldn't really follow it with his eyes; searching for the moment when Ienzo physically shifted was impossible. What he got was a delayed indication, the strobe effect without the light. The quiet swill of Ienzo's hand along the wall always raised the uncomfortable impression in Myde that what he was seeing was not what was actually happening.

Ienzo had explained it two weeks ago. Even though he made it clear that the ability was supposedly long gone, Zexion had been a master of illusions, the kind that stuck—the kind that coated your retina, filled your nose, settled on your tongue, and trapped you in a living nightmare from which, Ienzo insisted, there was usually no escape.

Shadows apparently had nothing to do with it. Myde thought Ienzo was probably lying. One didn't get described as _shadow-walking_ for nothing.

And one certainly didn't get a nickname like Schemer for nothing either.

"We were talking about Yen Sid's copy of the Akashic Record," Ienzo supplied, "and how you are going to bring it to me."

"Oh yea—wait, _what_?" Myde flinched, straightened from where he had been idly picking at a hole in his Converse.

Capping the marker in one smooth motion, Ienzo rolled his eyes and turned to face the beleaguered intern. "The Akashic Record—compendium of all human knowledge, history of the universe, mystical library on the astral plane made ink and paper, so on. Considering I helped write it—"

"But why _me_?"

Ienzo waved a dismissive hand. "Well you can't expect _me_ to—"

"But you're the one who wants—"

"—which means I have more to lose—"

"You can't just keep using me like—"

"—it'd be entertaining—"

"I could get fired—"

"—but considering Miss Aerith adores you—"

"I'm not going to win this one, am I?"

"No." Ienzo smiled, and it had nothing to do with kindness and everything to do with sweet, sweet victory.

"I hate you," Myde sighed. "And before you say something like 'You're not capable of hatred,' trust me, I am feeling really capable right now."

"For a change," Ienzo couldn't resist the opportunity to add, before he looked down to eye the cold tile with distaste and wonder briefly if he could convince Myde to fetch him a pair of socks. After half a moment's deliberation, he decided not to push.

"You know what?" the intern muttered, climbing to his feet with a huff. "You…" He paused, searching for a half decent insult but drawing a blank. "… really suck." He crossed the room in a few stumbling steps, his left leg asleep from sitting on it, and tugged open the second drawer on Ienzo's bland cream dresser. Taking careful aim, Myde lobbed a pair of RMH's standard socks at Ienzo.

Ienzo had never thought of his rather lacking hand-eye coordination as a serious character flaw until the moment the socks sailed past his raised hand and smacked him straight in the face. Myde felt almost totally vindicated.

"So basically…" Myde shut the drawer and leaned backward onto the dresser, wincing at the pins and needles running up his leg. "Yen Sid has a book. And you want it. And you want me to get it, which is _stealing_, and knowing Yen Sid, will not only get me fired, but will also get me like… flayed… alive."

"That is the general idea, yes," Ienzo said, waving a sock in confirmation.

Myde groaned and slumped where he stood. "Why is it always me?" he whimpered to himself for a moment before capitulating completely—as per usual. "All rightttt, just tell me the plan."

Ienzo explained.

"Okay, no, seriously…"

Ienzo explained again.

"That is so ridiculously complex I'm pretty sure I can't even remember _anything_ between steps three and forty-seven!" Myde wailed.

"It's a good thing then," and only Ienzo could manage to look conniving while straightening toe lines, "that you only need to know steps one, two, and forty-eight."

"But what if she doesn't put the ladle in the right spot? I mean, what if she puts it like _one inch_ to the left?" Myde flailed in place, not quite able to make his complete and utter disapproval obvious in words.

"She won't put it one inch to the left, because that's where she'll have put the salt after you've so kindly informed her that Denzel will appreciate an extra dose of sodium chloride's curative properties." Ienzo unfolded like a paper fan, in an inexplicable economy of movement, which Myde saw the end of clearly and the rest as only a vague impression of a body in one place and then in another. Ienzo stood, straightened his shirt, and brushed invisible dust off his sleeve. His level gaze was tempered blue flame, sparking with the invasive rays of dawn and all the decadent pleasure of being in his element.

"It will work," Ienzo insisted, crossing the room to stand next to Myde. His lips lifted at the corners, baring the tiniest sliver of tooth. "And it will be worth it."

"Really?" Myde shuffled his feet, the pins and needles finally fading away. "What's so special about this book anyway?"

Ienzo stared flatly for moment. "Other than it being the most complete record of the history of the universe, not much."

"No, I mean…" Myde rolled his eyes. "Why now? What's so special about it that you need it _right now_ and you didn't need it before?" He paused and something seemed to dawn on him. "Or could you not figure out a way to get it without me?" Myde couldn't help but smile as his last words brought a pinched look to Ienzo's face. The expression was a rare one—it took a particularly well-placed jab to raise that little wrinkle in his brow, and (if it had been a_ very _well-placed jab), to earn the barest crinkling of Ienzo's nose in distaste. If only Myde had a mirror to hold up and show Ienzo just how frustrated-sixteen-year-old he looked.

Ienzo was talking. "—course I could have easily found a way to retrieve it before now. However, I saw no use for it before; like I said—" he waved a dismissive hand on the way to crossing his arms, "I helped to write it; I'm already familiar with its most central points. The Akashic Record is primarily composed of notes and reports on the observations and experiments I and the others conducted under Ansem's tutelage and with additional information supplied by historians from Disney Castle. Up until now, I didn't see any reason to look back at it."

He shrugged, the motion moving his over-sized white nightshirt down his shoulder. "While it is one of the most complete records of the history of the galaxy in which we are probably currently residing, that doesn't actually say much. The book raises more questions than it answers—something which always troubled me as a child."

He did look briefly troubled again, as if recalling the old feelings, but Myde was too busy being caught up on his words to really notice. _As a child?_

Myde was suddenly struck by the knowledge that while Ienzo had told him so many things in the last three weeks, he had never so much as offered _real_ facts about himself. Myde knew Ienzo had been an apprentice to a man called Ansem the Wise, and that his and the other apprentices' (rather amoral) experiments into the nature of hearts had resulted in them losing their own—but _as a child?_

Just how long had Zexion been alive, before Demyx joined the Organization?

Myde opened his mouth to ask, but Ienzo was talking again, that quiet, determined glint in his eyes, and Myde thought maybe it would be better not to ask at all. If Ienzo had wanted him to know, he would have told.

But then that made Myde wonder how much he was not being told.

"I suppose you could consider the Akashic Record _Ienzo's_ Master's thesis, if university had been an option in Radiant Garden."

_Speaking of Masters' theses_, Myde thought bitterly, _you already wrote one_. Some time last week the conversation had turned to Myde's experience at the university and how he was very nearly done with his degree. Ienzo had looked particularly smug when he'd informed Myde that he'd obtained two Bachelor's degrees by his eighteenth birthday and had finished his Master of Arts coursework only two months prior to Myde's arrival in the hospital. With an emphasis in ancient fiction, of all things. And while Myde had slaved to win scholarships so he wouldn't be a burden to his mother, Ienzo had gotten all that private schooling at the hardworking taxpayers' expense. _Damn rehabilitative justice!_ Myde shook a mental fist.

"So obviously," Ienzo was saying, "it didn't seem necessary until yesterday, when I thought…" He trailed off, and Myde's attention was drawn back to the conversation by his sudden silence. Ienzo shifted where he stood, looked away slightly.

"You thought what?" Ienzo's hesitation unsettled Myde, made all his muscles clench with the beginnings of some ingrained instinct to_ run_. When Ienzo could not say it, it was either very bad, or—

Ienzo surveyed Myde from the corners of his eyes, a long, guarded look. When his voice came, it was purposefully measured. "I realized that it might have some information about our situation." This last word was a challenge—daring Myde to call it something else, daring him to say it all wasn't some massive riddle to be answered. They'd argued over this before: Myde could not understand what explanation Ienzo was looking for; why did they need an explanation? They both knew how to _fix_ the problem, so… _But. But. But._

But if he knew anything, Myde knew when to give in, so he slumped further, his Converse sliding across the tile with raucous squeaks. He hung his head, sighing for the third time that morning. "And where the heck am I going to get bubblegum?"

"Lobby vending machine, next to the fake fig tree on your right after stepping off elevator. Eighty-five cents. If you don't have change, the pediatrics nurses in Hall C on the second floor always have quarters. Do not ask Miss Belle. In fact, it would be best if she didn't notice you at all." And then Ienzo was pushing him toward the door, hands frigid against Myde's shoulder blades, even through the scrub.

"Hey, hey, umm… even if we do pull off this insane scheme, isn't Yen Sid going to notice his tome of awesome universal mumbo-jumbo is gone?" Myde stared over his shoulder, twitching in surprise when Ienzo scowled.

"The man may be a genius in his own field, but just like he refuses to believe anything I say, he considers the book's contents—as you so succinctly put it—'mumbo-jumbo.' I imagine if he didn't respect all books on principle, he'd have already thrown it away. If you don't leave an obvious hole in the bookshelf, I'll be done with it before he notices its absence." The little wrinkle between Ienzo's blue-steel eyebrows was back. "I assure you, the only reason he refuses to lend it to me is out of some personal vendetta."

"Does that personal vendetta," Myde offered slyly, "have anything to do with all the trouble you've caused the hospital?"

Ienzo cocked an eyebrow and crushed his smirk with obvious effort. "Trouble?" he deadpanned. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Uh-huh," Myde rolled his eyes as he fumbled with the doorknob. "You can try and play it innocent all you want, but I know the truth." He stumbled through the doorway and into the hall. "You," he mock-hissed back into the room, "are evil, eeevilll." Menacing finger wiggling accompanied the words.

Clad in all white from his collar to his toes, his hair inattentively tucked behind his ears, Ienzo was a splash of breath and brilliance against the golden light and fresh paint of the violet background, pale skin lit from behind, his shadow tapering to nothing on the white tile floor. He could have been the picture of perfection if his smile hadn't been so damn smug.

"Good morning to you too, Myde," he said, and that was all.

Myde carefully pulled the door closed, listening to the lock hiss into the place. Beside his hand on the knob, the tiny red light began to blink.

Myde swallowed heavily as he made his way down the hall. _We can do this._

_I can do this._

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Aerith waved goodbye to her last morning session and then, without a pause even for breath, rounded on Myde, her eyes narrowing a little in suspicion.

He had been fidgeting—for the last six hours. The time had passed uncomfortably slow, and as Aerith progressed through patients, Myde had gotten more and more jumpy, until at last Selphie—the twelve-year-old who insisted she was a pilot and a mercenary and possessed a penchant for wielding the hospital's playground jumpropes like insane nunchucks—had said the word "lunch" and Myde had flinched so badly he'd dropped the stack of reports Aerith asked him to read.

"Is something wrong, Myde?"

"W-Wrong? Er, nope, nothing! Nothing wrong here!" He waved his hands desperately, knowing he was acting blatantly transparent and just too nervous to fake calm.

His nonexistent nonchalance certainly wasn't fooling Aerith. She quirked an elegant eyebrow at him, and the way she leaned toward him just the slightest, her hands on her hips, made Myde suspect he was in for the sweetest interrogation he'd ever suffered. Then her malachite eyes sparked and Myde remembered that this was the woman who had been putting up with Ienzo for years, and he thought that maybe the interrogation wouldn't be so sweet after all.

"There's really not anything bothering you?" Her question was entirely rhetorical. "You're fidgeting." Myde's hands—which had been toying with the hem of his scrub—jerked back to his sides. Aerith smiled, a flash of soft white teeth and the glitter of sheer pink lip gloss. "You're not keeping a secret, are you?"

"N-No!" Myde sputtered before he could reign in his voice. "Definitely not. I just… I just…" He cast around for a plausible excuse, eyes darting from the worn covers of Aerith's books to the dim rainbow of her flowering plants, both scattered liberally around the room. He felt himself fidgeting again, like—"I just have to go to the restroom!" Myde blurted out, more loudly and triumphantly than was socially acceptable in any context.

Aerith blinked.

"Um, yep, the restroom, I gotta—so I'm gonna go now, yep, meet you at the lunch room, bye!" Myde hurled himself out of Aerith's office and down the hall, fighting desperately to keep the mortified blush off his face. Most. embarrassing. plausible. excuse. ever. Hyperbolic use of periods entirely justified.

"You've got more to lose in this Ienzo?" Myde growled to the pasteboard ceiling. "Yeah, I guess my _dignity_'s no big deal."

Back in her office, Aerith blinked again. "But there's a restroom right across the hall."

Leaning against the wall a corridor and a half over, Myde struggled to settle his racing heart (more from the stress of coming up with a lie than from his dramatic escape from said obvious lie, in all honesty). She was really going to suspect something now. Myde toyed with the slim pack of gum resting like a lead weight in his scrub pocket.

It was _Freedent_, old people's gum that didn't stick to dentures, in spearmint flavor. Myde had bought it hoping it wouldn't stick to door bolts either, and knowing that he hated the taste of spearmint. But even that overly green-white flavor was preferable right now to the acerbic nausea settling on the back of his tongue. He crinkled the silver wrapping of a stick of gum into a tiny ball and braced himself for the chill he would feel more in his nose than his mouth.

Myde ran through the plan again. It was still too complicated. Ienzo's plans always relied on people acting a certain way, being predictable down to the flick of a wrist or the placement of a ladle. Myde didn't understand how they ever worked—but they did work. If Ienzo said that Nurse Porter would take three steps to the left, she would take exactly three steps to the left, no more, no less, not one backward or forward, or ever to the right. Ienzo said it was because people lived in patterns, a set of stock gestures that deviated only slightly to fit the given situations. The trick, he said, to knowing anything (maybe everything) was to watch—and memorize. Myde had been watching Ienzo. If he had a pattern beyond hating cold floors, Myde couldn't see it.

Sometimes he thought it wasn't that people lived in patterns but that Ienzo caught them up in patterns, that Jane took three steps to the left _because_ Ienzo said she would. Sometimes Myde was sure the sky would fall if Ienzo just predicted its falling.

And sometimes when Myde looked into a heavy-lidded cobalt eyes he saw only darkness, pure, unbroken darkness like a great expanse of still, deep water in the night, like a promise fulfilled by the wrong person, what _wanting_ would be if wanting could be made into viscous fluid, nerves, capillaries, keratin.

And Myde didn't understand.

Ienzo said he couldn't weave illusions anymore. But what Demyx remembered was that Zexion liked to lie.

But that didn't matter now. What mattered now was that Myde was no longer under Aerith's watch, and that whether it worked or not, he knew what he was going to do. He was going to walk to the elevator, and into the cafeteria, and because Ienzo had arranged it just so, Marlene would be stirring soup and Myde would tell her that extra salt could help Denzel's cold (and hell if Ienzo hadn't planned that too) and she would set down the ladle and he… would turn the hospital in a madhouse to get a book for a boy who moved like shadow and stared back with eyes full of Myde's half-forgotten nightmares.

The spearmint flavor from the gum was cold in his mouth and nose. The elevator doors shuddered closed behind him.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Ienzo paced, the sort of reckless, blind pacing that never kept to a straight line. He sometimes got this way when relying on others—when relying on Demyx of all people.

Zexion had never been this way. Axel had called him the Supreme High Jackass of Kingdom Self-Assurance once (Ienzo thought about pots and kettles), but it hadn't even been that—it had been patience (or perhaps just the lack of anxiety) which bought Zexion immeasurable quantities of stillness, the clarity (or perhaps just the lack of anxiety) to watch his comrades dying and still think _Yes, they are all where I want them to be._

Zexion had had power. _Ienzo_ had had power too—not the same, not even close, but anything was more than what Ienzo, what _he_ had in this empty, urban world. Zexion made dreams reality and reality dreams with the snap of his fingers. Ienzo had trouble distinguishing between being awake and being asleep.

"Oh, how the mighty..." He didn't bother to finish the sentence. That wasn't rue in his voice.

He paced.

He was switching back for the thirty-third time when the muffled clicking of heels and the measured tread another unpleasantly familiar set of footsteps prickled at the corner of his attention. Ienzo stilled, considered his appearance—on the whole unsettled—and found it lacking. With deliberate slowness he crossed the room and settled himself in the teal chair, scooping the Sharpie off the seat before collapsing into it. Half-ingenuously and half-artfully, he leaned back against the wall, eyes fixing on an out of place dot on the ceiling which might have been a spider. The marker flicked idly in his hand.

There was another second or so of stillness in the room, and then the light on the door lock flashed and Aerith, Tseng trailing behind her, held the door open into the dim. She was talking to Tseng (she had been talking all along, but voices had always had the hardest time reaching him), the smile on her face so genuine as to seem rare—although they weren't, usually; it was just, Ienzo mused, that Aerith Gainsborough had less to smile at around him.

"—very thoughtful of you. I know my father would appreciate it," she finished.

"It is the least I can do in his memory," Tseng replied, and for a moment Ienzo watched the near invisible up-curve at the corner of the man's lips with something not quite like disbelief. Then any trace of fondness in the security guard's expression was sharply curtailed, as Aerith turned her gaze on Ienzo. Her look was bright and friendly, if a bit belated in arriving.

"Time for lunch," she insisted, before tilting her head just so and lifting her hands to her hips. "And _you_ wouldn't have idea why Myde's been acting so strange today, would you?"

_Well, he didn't spill the whole plan out then_, Ienzo sighed to himself, partly relieved and partly exasperated. _That's almost an achievement._

"Myde is acting strange?" He shifted and then stood, making a show of it, as if he had been sitting for a long time. He smirked. "Stranger than usual?"

Aerith tried hard not to laugh, but in the end even she couldn't hold back a small chuckle. Her hands fell back to her sides, suspicion assuaged. For the moment. "It's true," she smiled. "Even by our standards, he's a little… odd."

Our standards. Ienzo wondered why that bothered him as much as it did, and who, exactly, "our" included.

Preventing himself from scowling, he crossed the room again (for the thirty-fifth time, since this morning), and passed both Aerith and Tseng without looking at either of them, striding into the hall as if he owned it and turning toward the elevator that would take them all to the cafeteria. "What is on the lunch menu?"

_Not that I will be eating lunch today_, he continued.

"Hmm," Aerith thought for a moment. "Minestrone soup and turkey wraps. Brownies," she added, as if to appease.

Ienzo cocked his head and, for the first time that day, worked hard not to genuinely smile. He stared at her from the corner of his eye. "With powdered sugar?"

"I think so," Aerith said, a furrow forming on her brow. Ienzo had never shown any particular interest in powdered sugar before.

_Oh this_, he thought, _is going to be brilliant_.

And really, it _was_.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde could hear the James Bond theme playing—quite loudly—from somewhere above and behind him. He tip-toed along the wall of the cafeteria, humming quietly to his own imaginary background music. His eyes snapped from one side to the other fast enough to give anyone watching closely motion sickness. To Myde, it felt like just about everyone was watching.

In reality, there were perhaps one or two people watching half-heartedly, more interested in the way the new intern was attempting to become one with the wall than _why_ exactly said intern felt the need to turn himself into a new layer of paint (especially confusing because the wall was pure white, and Myde's scrub was dark blue). When Myde lagged too long in one place, attention on him also lagged.

And there was certainly a lot of lagging going on. Though he'd accepted his fate in the hall so far away, now that he was looking at the kitchen doors, the entire concept seemed impossible to swallow. He was about to start a riot. _He_ was. Myde thought he might have been hyperventilating, but considering he was also going through some bizarre half out-of-body experience, it was a bit hard to tell.

"What're you doing Myde?"

Myde leapt three feet in the air and shrieked loud enough that everyone looked over. Marlene scowled up at him and cautiously unpeeled her hands from where she'd cupped them over her ears.

"Don't _do_ that!" Myde mustered the breath to squeak. "You—"

"Scaredy," Marlene smiled, locking her hands behind her back and tilting her head in a way that was decidedly Aerith-like. "What were you sneaking around for?" And that particular glint in her look could have been Aerith too. Myde groaned to himself.

"I wasn't… I wasn't sneaking around!" he insisted, trying to stifle his fidgeting. "I was…" No going back now. "I was looking for you, actually!" Myde felt the world collapsing in degrees, the words "termination notice" echoing darkly in his head. It was all starting to feel like a comedic action film—this was the part where the massive boulder started rolling and he was fresh out of vines to swing across the gaping pit of abyss.

"Me?" Marlene looked suspicious.

"Um, yeah!" Myde unplastered himself from the wall. "Denzel's sick, isn't he?"

Something in Marlene's eyes flickered before she looked away. "Mmhm."

"Well," he managed a smile, "somebody told me that soup is good for sick people because the salt in it kills germs."

Marlene looked up to him, expression brightening.

"You're helping with the soup today, right?" When she nodded exuberantly, he crossed the last few feet and held open the door to the bustling kitchen. "No one would notice a little extra salt." Smiling had always come easy to him—it took only a bit of effort to look conspiratorial (or what he thought looked conspiratorial) too.

Marlene smiled back, nodding again, and rushed into the kitchen. With one last surreptitious look at the now disinterested cafeteria crowd and twittering nurses—Elena and another girl in a security uniform, vaguely wavy brown hair falling between her shoulders, stood on either side of a table on the far side of the room, engrossed in resolving a dispute between two raging patients—Myde breathed out and pulled the kitchen door shut behind him.

From across the kitchen, Marlene waved him over impatiently. Ducking and swerving to avoid the staff with their boiling hot pans and precariously stacked towers of dishes, Myde stumbled over to Marlene. She had already folded her braid up in a hair net and was slipping on vinyl gloves by the time Myde reached her. Someone had pre-poured the soup into the giant stainless steel vat mostly sunken into the counter. Marlene peeled the lid back. The heat was on beneath the soup, that much Myde could tell, but the soup itself was nowhere near hot enough to put off steam. Standing on her tip-toes, Marlene reached up and pulled a ladle off the wall. Myde tried not to twitch.

She stirred the soup once all the way around before leaning the ladle against the side of the vat.

"I'll go get it!" she stage whispered to him and then vanished into the melee. Myde didn't need to ask what "it" was. He did twitch. Through the dish return window, he could see Elena, red in the face with anger, waving an indignant fist. The brown-haired girl was laughing behind her hand.

"Here!"

Myde jumped again, clapping both hands to his mouth to keep from shouting. His heart felt like it had leapt out of his chest.

He spun to find Marlene covertly holding a cylinder of salt in both hands. "Here," she repeated, but didn't hand the salt to him. "Only a little," she scolded, pursing her lips and furrowing her brow as if he'd been planning to dump the entire container in, despite the fact that she still held it.

With deft hands, Marlene tugged out the spout on the container and tipped it gently over the edge of the soup vat. A thin line of salt crystals spilled out and pooled in a small mountain on the surface of the soup before diffusing.

"That's enough?" Marlene looked up at him. Myde watched a few more grains tip into the soup before he nodded. It didn't matter how much salt Marlene put into the soup; the ladle was what was important—

And speaking of the ladle, Marlene had just picked it up. Myde tensed. This was it. It was as if his vision had narrowed to the single point of the silver ladle swirling in the soup, and even that had slowed down to a crawl. Marlene stirred once and then again, pushing deep into the soup to prevent the bottom from scorching. The long metal handle rapped against the side of the pot. Myde felt a nervous tic coming on.

Then, content that the salt had melted down and the soup was sufficiently stirred for the moment, Marlene withdrew the ladle. She tapped it twice to shake off extra liquid, and then set it exactly where Ienzo had said she would, to the right of the salt… within his reach.

Myde counted to ten, forcing himself to breathe slowly and deeply. He waited for Marlene to look the other way. She didn't. She was saying something about Denzel, but Myde only eyed the ladle. He counted to ten again.

At seven, someone across the kitchen called rather desperately for Marlene, and she looked over, hairnet bouncing behind.

It was Myde's only chance. He seized it.

With an audible gasp, Myde reached out, snatched up the ladle, and hurled it across the kitchen.

"MOUSEEE!" he screamed. The ladle spun through the air, trailing drops of soup and glinting silver, and set off a chain of unbelievable events. As Myde was yelling, the ladle struck the metal plated kitchen wall with a horrific _CLANG!_ and glanced off, spiraling back through the air and slamming into the giant sack of powdered sugar a panicked chef had just scooped up off the floor. The sack exploded upward, spraying its contents all over the chef in a thick coat and filling the kitchen air with a veritable cloud of sugar.

"My eyes!" the chef shouted, dropping the sack and coating the floor and himself even more. He ground at his eyes desperately, but his hands were covered with the clingy white sugar. He stumbled backward at the exact moment to run smack into another cafeteria worker rushing toward where Myde'd thrown the ladle, a spatula clutched in her hand like a sword.

"Where is it? Where is it?" she was shrieking over the clanging of pots, the pounding of footsteps, the cries of the other kitchen staff, and Marlene, elevated to safety on the counter cheering, "Catch it, catch it!"

The chef crashed into her, spraying powder, and both of them slipped backward in the sugar on the floor, hands wheeling wildly through the air. The spatula whirled out and struck a container of steaming mixed vegetables left on the edge of the counter by another frantic employee.

Boiling baby carrots, broccoli, and heads of cauliflower sailed through the air, spilling out across the floor and striking another racing cafeteria lady.

"HOT!"

"Where _is_ it?"

Another employee hit the vegetables and sugar at a run and skidded across the floor, slamming into someone desperately attempting to put down a vat of ranch dressing. It was like toppling dominoes.

"AUGH!"

"Stop running!"

"I saw it! I SAW IT OVER HERE!"

"I can't see anything! Who spilled the sugar?"

"My eyes!"

Myde slunk very carefully toward the kitchen door, hugging the wall for the second time that day. On the main path in the kitchen, the floor was so slippery the employees tripped and staggered as they wildly switched sides in the room, unsure whether to clean the mess or hunt for the mouse—which now seemed to not only exist, but also to have multiplied several times over.

Someone screamed and clambered up onto the counter. "It's here! I saw something run under the sink!"

There was a great sucking in of breath, and the room suddenly stilled in response. In the far corner, a man that Myde had not even taken notice of before was gasping short, ragged breaths in. He was elephantine in structure, with legs and arms as thick around as Myde's head, and forearms that bleed into his hands as if there were no wrists between. The man had easily broken six feet tall, and—Myde couldn't help but think—six feet wide as well. The tuft of brown hair on top of his head seemed to stand straight up but paled in comparison to his ears, which almost encompassed the width of the man's head from top to bottom. Myde couldn't help but stare.

"Ah, no, no, it's okay Tantor," someone was whispering in the soothing voice reserved for terrified kindergartners. Myde looked closer and realized that this was the easily spooked patient Ienzo had mentioned.

This was…

"M—" The man had folded both of his enormous hands to his chest, training wide-flared eyes on the floor. He shuffled his tree-trunk legs and feet in a desperate attempt to see underneath himself. "M-M-M—"

"Tantor, no!" someone shouted from the floor.

"M-M-_MOUSE_?" With steps that shook the floor, the elephantine man turned and plowed through the kitchen doors into the dining hall.

There was a terrific _CRACK!_ like metal and pasteboard splitting and hitting the ground… and then the screaming started.

Through the tray-stacking window, Myde caught Elena and the other security girl rushing across the room amid patients running, shouting, and leaping onto the tables.

_Step 24… check_, Myde groaned, shortly before he thought, _Oh God, I'm going to lose my job_.

Marlene rushed past him on her way to the door, and after a moment reserved for private cringing, Myde followed.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Aerith heard the chaos before they reached it.

"What was that… noise?" Her steps faltered for a second while her brain supplied the thought that the sound had… sounded a lot like plastic lunch trays being hurled against a wall. As if to make up for her stumble, Aerith doubled her pace. Tseng had already stepped in front of her, and Ienzo trailed behind, in no particular hurry. He already knew exactly what they were going to find.

Tseng and Aerith pushed through the cafeteria doors, and the security guard immediately swung out his arm to protect Aerith from… a flying bowl of salad?

The room was a disaster zone. There were no other words to describe it, no matter how Ienzo tried. Several tables had been broken—the first was split clean in two (Ienzo was willing to bet that this was where Tantor had attempted to clamber out of the non-existent mouse's way), but others had cracked and broken under the weight of other patients: grown women squealing about hating mice, little boys screaming just to scream, people not cognizant enough to know why they'd gotten on the table in the first place and not cognizant enough to get down.

Someone had started throwing trays, spoons, and all the garnishes from the salad bar. Across the room, two teenage boys were wielding their plastic cutlery like deadly weapons, and seemed to be making every effort to actually maim each other.

"What'd you say about my face, lamer?" the stockier boy was growling at the top of his lungs. That was Seifer, Ienzo thought, from the authoritarian complex unit.

"That it's butt ugly!" And that was Hayner, from… actually, Ienzo had no idea what that boy was doing in the hospital. It wouldn't have surprised him if Hayner had showed up in Rufus Memorial simply to antagonize Seifer.

"Then how about I rearrange yours to match?" Seifer grinned.

"Yours'll match, ya know?"

"UGLY." And _those _were Rai and Fuu, the pilot fish to Seifer's bull shark.

Hayner spit out some witty comeback, but by that time, Ienzo was already looking at the other side of the room—where Chester was swaying dangerously from his perch atop Tantor's head, his grin putting the moon to shame.

"Quick, the jam! Quick!" the cat man crowed. "_Don't_ disturb the mouse! The jam!"

"M-M-M-MOUSSSEE!"

Nurse Bagheera was circling and ducking around the flailing elephant man nervously, glancing around as if expecting someone to come to his aide. Unfortunately for him, Elena and the other security guards were already enmeshed in their own struggles. Cissnei was very politely attempting to remove Ariel from where she was clinging to the emergency exit doors. Kairi and Selphie were milling nearby—whether to help or hinder Cissnei, Ienzo did not care.

"Oh dear!" Across the room, Nurse Porter had been cornered by the madly grinning Stitch. Lilo had both her arms wrapped around his waist and dragged behind like a dead weight.

"No Stitch, _no_!" She hauled backward as hard as she could. "You're gonna get a time out!"

A chef came streaming by, coated with powdered sugar and moaning miserably. Behind him, Huey, Dewey, and Louie were in hot pursuit.

"A ghost!"

"You saw it didn't you?"

"I saw it!" They clambered around and over each other, bumping and shoving. If the chef had been able to see clearly, he might have run.

Across the room, the older male security guard Veld was attempting to separate the flamboyant Kuja and Zidane, who looked about ready to claw his older brother's eyes out. Then again, Ienzo mentally shrugged, that was nothing new.

"Tseng!" Elena screamed over the chaos. Loz was attached to her back like some kind of mutant leech which had grown limbs_ just_ to facilitate its desire to tear at Elena's hair. Yazoo was at her feet, doing something that looked suspiciously like tying her shoelaces together. And Kadaj… swung wildly where Elena held him upside-down by his ankle as far away from her body as she could manage. "Tsenggg!"

Tseng looked back at Aerith (who was momentarily frozen, still struggling to take in the war zone the cafeteria had deteriorated into), and then at Ienzo, his concern hardening into something halfway between a warning and a request. Ienzo nodded, although he was not sure if that was what Tseng wanted from him. If it hadn't been, the security guard didn't show it—he turned and vanished into the maddening crowd, leaving Aerith—and Ienzo—unguarded.

"We have to do something!" Aerith came back to herself in a rush, at the exact moment when Doctor Harvey waved her over to where a large group of patients had started a game of what looked like Ultimate Frisbee with plates. It had quickly devolved into keep-away.

Aerith must have expected Ienzo to follow. She honestly must have, because she didn't even look back when she hurried to assist Cecil.

At the edge of the chaos, Ienzo was completely alone.

He surveyed the cafeteria from one end to the other slowly, cocking an eyebrow as plates, trays, silverware and small people flew through the air to a symphony of screams and laughter.

Then Ienzo very simply turned and left.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde twisted to avoid a pair of grasping arms and then abruptly ducked to escape an oncoming, high-speed plastic cup. Across the room, Myde caught sight of a flash of pink and brown that metastasized into Aerith, concern and fierce determination warring in her expression. She had somehow come by a long-handled broom, and was using it (rather effectively) to bat away flying objects.

As a plastic spork came sailing through the air and smacked him on the cheek, Myde wished he had a broom for protection as well. Nevertheless, he pushed on, sweeping the room for—there was Tseng, in the act of restraining a wailing Kadaj. Which meant Ienzo… Myde scanned the area near the cafeteria doors and found it devoid of anyone with blue hair.

It was time for the second half of the plan. Myde gulped, but it was mostly superficial now. His nervousness had evaporated sometime after Tantor had stampeded into the main hall. There was no looking back now. Do or die.

"Doctor Gainsborough!" he shouted. She couldn't hear him. "Doctor Gainsborough!"

Aerith looked up. "Myde!"

Myde elbowed his way across the room (as gently as possible), going out of his way to avoid Doctor Pan, who was doing something that looked suspiciously like encouraging the madness.

"Myde, you're here!" Aerith let him into the circle of protection provided by her broom. Instinctively, he ducked behind her, fighting the natural urge to cower.

"I came here for lunch duty with you, but…" he didn't need to finish or even gesture. Aerith was too busy to be suspicious. Now so long as no one remembered who exactly shouted mouse first—as long, really, as no one asked Marlene what had happened—just like Ienzo said, there was no reason for anyone to suspect poor, bumbling Myde of full-scale bedlam. Unless Marlene thought to turn him in, Ienzo insisted, even Aerith—who had every reason to be disbelieving—shouldn't connect the riot-sparking mouse with Myde's fidgeting… at least for a while.

Myde hated that Ienzo was always right.

Someone tripped and fell in front of them, and Aerith quickly knelt to help the patient up before he was stepped on.

"Thanks," the man droned, in what was positively the least enthusiastic voice Myde had ever heard. "Not that it'll make much difference," the man continued, slumping away from them. "'s not like anybody notices when I'm here, standin' or not."

"Oh Eeyore," Aerith sighed, her voice almost entirely lost to the mayhem. The scruffy, gloomy man had already vanished.

"We've gotta do something!" Myde had to keep shouting even though they were standing next to each other. "Aren't there any more security guards?"

"No!" Aerith managed to remain calm, even in the face of crisis. "We've never had a situation as big as this one!"

Myde was resolutely going to pretend that twinge in his stomach was not guilt.

"Isn't there anyone—"

"We need to get Doctor Yen Sid!" Aerith shouted. "But everyone is—" Her eyes swept the cafeteria.

"You and I can get him!" Meeting with Yen Sid face to face again was the part he liked absolute least about this plan. Myde could see Aerith mentally calculating how far it was now to the cafeteria doors, and then looking around the room again. _Oh please don't call for Tseng_, Myde thought. _Nottt Tseng!_

Aerith seemed to decide against calling for back-up (although, Myde thought belatedly, it was probably more likely that she was worried they were needed), and with deft if untrained hands, managed to twirl, bat, and block their way toward the doors with her trusty broom. Outside in the hall, Myde took several long, steadying breaths. Next to him, Aerith was doing the same.

"Come on," she managed. "We've got to hurry." They clattered down the hall to the nearest elevator. Myde noticed that Aerith had not dropped the broom.

The elevator creaked melodically enough to be playing the funeral march. Myde couldn't shake the sensation that Yen Sid would be able to read guilt as if it had been written on Myde's forehead. Before he realized it, they were at Yen Sid's freaky star door. Myde thought about the violet room two halls over and prayed Ienzo was paying perfect attention.

The rest of this entire fiasco was counting on it.

Aerith knocked on the door with as much reserve as she could manage. "Doctor Yen Sid, downstairs, there's—there's a serious situation that needs your attention." In response, the door flew open. But Yen Sid had not opened it; he was ensconced behind his desk just like the first time Myde had met him. As they watched, Yen Sid unfolded his long, gnarled hands and stood, bracing himself with fingers splayed and lingering on the tabletop. If Myde had thought the man was imposing sitting down, that had been nothing compared to the fierce aura that seemed to emanate from him as he stood. Myde felt very much like running for his life.

But he didn't. Instead, he hid behind Aerith, listened to her brief Yen Sid on the extent of the mayhem below, and then waited—as if polite—when Aerith turned and Yen Sid swept past. He followed them at a slower pace into the hall.

And in the doorway, he stopped, slipped the now tasteless, near colorless gum out of his mouth, and stuffed it in the latch. When the door shut behind him, it did not shut with a click. Myde tried the handle, and found that it turned readily.

With quick, even steps, Myde caught back up with Aerith and Yen Sid, falling in line for the march to the elevator. Slipping in as far from Yen Sid as he could, Myde hit the door close button.

_All right, now…_

The doors closed, and the elevator shuddered downward…one floor, where it dinged, and the doors opened again—on Ienzo, his hand still resting on the elevator call pad. Myde felt Aerith tense from head to toe. Ienzo leaned back, the look on his face something between amusement and manufactured concern. Myde caught the closing elevator door and held it.

"You're not… supposed to be on this floor…" Aerith stumbled.

Ienzo quirked an eyebrow… and took off running in the opposite direction. Immediately, as nobly as he could manage, Myde leapt off the elevator in chase.

"I'll catch him!" he threw back over his shoulder toward the elevator doors closing on Aerith and Yen Sid. "Don't worry!"

"But—" and that was all Aerith got to say before the elevator closed. _Pleaseee,_ Myde prayed, _go downstairs and deal with that!_ Actually being able to get the book from Yen Sid's office relied on Aerith and Yen Sid deciding a riot was more pressing than assisting with the retrieval of a prisoner. Kind of a no-brainer, but… Myde breathed a sigh of relief when the floor display above the elevator switched from two to one, and he turned and followed Ienzo, who was probably waiting around the nearest corner by now.

If Ienzo had just gone and taken the book himself! _But no, of course not_, Myde whined, _you have to do it Myde, and we'll play catch-me-if-you-can for an alibi!_

Myde turned the corner and found Ienzo leaning against it, looking a little worse for the wear. Although the hall couldn't have been more than a hundred yards, Ienzo was completely winded.

"I hate running," he coughed, steadying himself on the wall. And then, after a moment to breathe, he continued, "That's what I miss most."

Myde had been trying very, very hard not to snicker, but that feeling trailed off quickly. Ienzo never talked about missing anything. "What?"

"The ability to levitate." Deadpan. Myde couldn't keep himself from laughing then.

"_That's_ what you miss most?" Ienzo looked about ready to sock him, but Myde couldn't stop his traitorous mouth from adding, "You are _so_ lazy!"

Ienzo didn't sniff in indignation, but he might as well have. "I prefer the term 'energy conservation conscious', but—" without giving Myde time to start laughing again, he crossed his arms and dropped the proverbial ice cube down Myde's back: "—you don't have the time to stand around debating semantics, do you?"

Myde crumpled like loose paper. "Whyyy am I doing this?"

Ienzo actually had the gall to pat him comfortingly on the shoulder. "Because you are a tool."

The saddest thing was that he was totally right. Myde didn't remember all that much of Demyx's life, but he remembered enough to believe that tool-dom was probably an inherent state of his being… and non-being. Sigh.

There was a distant clatter of footsteps and both Myde and Ienzo froze.

"Hurry," Ienzo hissed.

"You're not coming with me?" Myde floundered. Ienzo had already turned away.

"We're playing catch-me-if-you-can, remember? It wouldn't do for no one to notice." With a flash of smile, he was gone. For all his dislike of running, Myde was struck by the impression that if Ienzo did not want to be caught, he never would be, like chasing your shadow away from the sun.

The footsteps got closer, and Myde jerked into action. He stumbled back toward the elevator and stabbed at the Third Floor and Door Close buttons, praying whatever nurse, security guard, or patient that was coming would not see him. If anyone saw him heading to the third floor alone, losing his job would be less of a concern and more of a reality. When the doors squeaked shut, it sounded very final. For the first time since kicking off this insane plan, Myde realized losing his job might really be the least of his concerns. If Yen Sid wanted to, he could charge Myde with burglary.

"The things I do for—" The elevator dinged, and Myde clambered out of it and into Yen Sid's poorly lit hall. His knees were shaking almost as badly as the very first time he'd entered Rufus Memorial.

_It's just borrowing, it's just borrowing, it's just borrowing, really…_

The night sky door to Yen Sid's office looked a lot like an insurmountable wall. Myde almost wished the gum had slipped and the lock had caught sometime in the five minutes since he'd last been here. A bead of sweat rolled into his eye.

_He won't even notice, he won't even notice…_

With a shaking hand, Myde reached out and pulled the door to Yen Sid's office open. Like a levy bursting, his hesitation turned into manic energy the second he crossed the office threshold, and in a panicked whirlwind, Myde tore across the room to the bookcase, running his hand along the fastidiously arranged and even book spines, looking for the brown and purple book Ienzo had described.

Top shelf, second shelf, third shelf, fourth shelf, bottom shelf… It wasn't there.

Myde jerked, started again, and then again, and—found it where'd he already looked three times, near the end of the third shelf. It was thinner than he'd thought it would be, but heavier and wider too. He strained to heft it under an arm and then to hold onto it while rearranging the other books to fill the empty place on the shelf. Ienzo had been right: the books were so tightly packed onto each shelf, it was only a matter of putting a few millimeters of space between each one.

All this was accomplished in the span of about two minutes—two minutes which felt just a few seconds short of eternity for Myde. Ienzo had said he wouldn't have long; Yen Sid could still a crowd like a gunshot. Myde was sure Yen Sid would be back any second, throwing open the door in that way of his, staring down…

With the Akashic Record trapped against his side, Myde turned tail and ran for his life. Well…he did stop at the door to pull the gum out of the jamb (with only a little difficulty), listening for the lock to click, but after that, he ran for his life.

Foregoing waiting for the elevator in favor of the stairs, Myde crashed down a first and second flight and spilled into the second floor hall, nearly dropping the book in the process. He was extremely tempted to tuck it under his scrub to hide it. Before he could follow through on the idea, however, the Akashic Record was neatly plucked from under his arm.

"WAH—"

"You actually did it." Ienzo's face was already buried in the book. "Congratulations."

"Congratulations?" Myde straightened up, trying not to gawk. "…Don't you mean 'thanks', at least?"

"Hm? Oh, yes. Thank you." Ienzo waved a dismissive hand, not bothering to look away from the lines Myde could see his eyes tracing.

"Seesh, I see how much I'm appreciated here," Myde pouted. Ienzo didn't even seem to hear him. _Note to self_, Myde groaned._ Getting between Ienzo and his books is even harder than getting between Yuffie and hawked jewelry._ He shifted to look at the book, trying to see the tiny lines of even tinier font. Ienzo tensed and snapped the book closed.

"Don't read over my shoulder," he glared, expression halfway between exasperation and impatience at the interruption, with the barest flicker of something else that made his eyes widen before they narrowed, a flicker of something which Myde could not quite name.

"But I'm the one that got the book in the first place," Myde argued. Ienzo's glare didn't lighten up at all. "I want to know what it's got to do with us!"

After another moment, Ienzo's shoulders fell, and though he didn't open the book again, the harsh lines of his glower evened out. "If I find something, I'll tell you," he said finally.

Myde knew he wouldn't get anything more from Ienzo than that. "Well then I guess I'll…"

Myde froze. Beside him, Ienzo tensed again. Another set of footsteps—but this time, they were instantly familiar to both boys.

That precise, sharp tapping could not belong to anyone but—

"Tseng," Ienzo ground out through his teeth. And then, just as venomously, "Run."

If there was one thing Myde could do, it was run. He took off down the hall, making no effort to muffle his pounding. Beside him, Ienzo struggled to keep up with Myde's longer stride and carry the Akashic Record too. Myde focused and heard Tseng's footsteps speed up to a sprint as well.

Myde slowed down to fall behind Ienzo, making sure that both their bodies blocked the book from being seen. Even if Tseng caught sight of them now, he would see Myde doing what Myde was supposed to be doing—chasing and catching Ienzo.

Tseng's footsteps were getting louder. "Hurry," Myde whispered. Ienzo shot a particularly exasperated look at him out of the corner of one eye, but picked up the pace a bit.

It wasn't enough. Myde could hear Tseng getting closer. "Hurry," he pushed. Ienzo, having lived years with minimum physical exertion, was already having trouble breathing. "Run faster," Myde pushed again.

"I can't," Ienzo hissed. His knuckles were white from his fierce grip on the Akashic Record. He turned both blue eyes on Myde. "I… can't…" His pupils contracted and then flared until they nearly consumed his irises and then all the world was the howling, shrieking sound of the air and ground and everything in between being torn open and falling, falling into a swirling of abyss of purple and grey and black—black, then, nothing but silent black, and Myde was not up or down and they were not together but they were not apart and they were there and not, and they were and they were not—

Wind or everything or nothing or just pure darkness tore at his scrub and at him until Myde felt himself ripped into tiny, tiny pieces that fell and spun wildly into the anarchy of the black side of the universe and everything or nothing in it.

And then the pieces were slammed back together and Myde plunged out of the swirling darkness into the burning white of… a hallway in Rufus Memorial? Only an instinct for self-preservation kept him from slamming face first into the floor. He stumbled backward and caught himself on the wall before his legs completely gave out underneath him.

A half second later, Ienzo fell down beside him, the Akashic Record still crushed against his chest. His hands were shaking. His face was bone white. Myde almost waved a hand to catch his attention, but the other boy looked like he was about to be violently ill, so Myde thought better of it. The hallway was dead quiet—no hint of Tseng or even Ienzo's racing breath.

That might have been because Ienzo wasn't breathing. "Hey!" Myde shouted, leaning over and reaching out to shake him, nausea be damned. "Snap out of it!" Ienzo was trembling under Myde's hands, but his eyes came into focus finally, and he coughed a sharp breath.

"What was _that_?" Myde shook him again for good measure.

Ienzo wasn't looking at him so much as he was looking at the empty square of hallway air they'd just burst out of. He was still shaking, and Myde wasn't sure if it was from using whatever freaky power it was he'd just used, or because he was afraid. Myde thought it might have been a little of both.

"That was…" Ienzo's voice was hesitant, as if even he didn't believe what he was saying. "That was a portal."

Portal. The opening and closing of a corridor of darkness, the roads walked by Heartless and those touched by the dark—one of the definitive abilities possessed by all Nobodies, powerful or weak. Myde knew this as a set of facts, established by Ienzo. He remembered the black and violet wormholes the Dancers had come through. But somehow he had never connected that ability with Ienzo or himself.

Ienzo had ripped open the door on darkness and hurled them through it faster than sound or any other measurement Myde had ever known, and he hadn't even meant to.

What could they do if they tried?

But more importantly at the moment… "Where the heck are we?"

Ienzo looked up at the directory plate on the wall just above their heads. He blinked once, slowly. "We are in the x-ray unit…two hallways from where we were," Ienzo said. His voice was steadier than before, and Myde almost thought everything was all right… but then Ienzo laughed.

And he laughed again, and then again, the sound trapped halfway between stunned amusement and bleak hysteria. He slumped against Myde's shoulder, caught by the sort of dry, unhappy chuckling that never really got started but couldn't be stopped.

"Two hallways," Ienzo breathed between one involuntary chuckle and the next. "I haven't… in all this time… two hallways."

Myde didn't think Ienzo was laughing because he found it funny. He looked like he didn't know what to do, like he had to laugh because if he didn't, he'd do something worse. And Myde knew there was something wrong, but he didn't know _what_, so there was nothing at all he could do to help. He leaned back against the wall with Ienzo on his shoulder and felt a little sick.

In a minute the quiet laughter faded into a hiccup or two, but that minute had to be the second or third longest of Myde's life. It felt like an eternity before Ienzo straightened—his face the perfect picture of nonchalance as if nothing had happened at all—and leaned back against the wall, loosening his grip on the book and breathing slow and long.

"In all this time… Why was it today?" he mused, almost to himself. That was more like it, Myde thought. _Scientific inquiry trumps all_. But it was too soon to rejoice: in the lull after Ienzo's laughter, Myde suddenly heard the sound of Tseng's footsteps, clear and getting closer.

"He caught up!" Myde hissed, because it was apparent from the way he'd tensed that Ienzo had heard the footsteps too. "Ummm, now would be a great be a great time for another portal," Myde whispered frantically.

Ienzo stared like he'd just been asked to walk on water and resurrect the dead at the same time. "I didn't intend to—"

"Could you intend to now?" Myde stared down the hallway where he expected Tseng would turn the corner any second. He felt more than saw Ienzo shift to extend an arm, his fingers spread, palm open toward the empty hallway.

Myde tensed in expectation, waiting for the fabric of reality to bubble open, but the hallway remained the same as ever, and Tseng got closer.

"Why isn't it working?" Myde twisted to watch Ienzo, who looked equally perturbed.

"It's possible that I can't open the corridors consciously," Ienzo muttered.

"Meaning?" Myde squeaked.

"Meaning it has been a tolerable experience knowing you, and as such, I hope your death at Yen Sid's hands is short and painless."

Myde made a sound that he would never admit was a terrified "Meep!" All the color drained out of his face. "But you're the one holding the book!"

"But I didn't start a riot, did I?" Ienzo managed a smile.

"I don't want to die!" Myde wailed. Tseng's footsteps picked up. He'd heard them. Myde leapt to his feet, frantically staring up and down the empty hallway as if one of the locked doors would fly open and offer them sanctuary on a silver platter. No such luck.

Tseng was going to see Ienzo with the book. There'd be questions about where the book had come from, and everyone would find out that it was Yen Sid's book, and then there'd be questions about how they'd gotten Yen Sid's book, and Aerith would say he'd been in there once already today, and then everyone would wonder if the riot wasn't just a distraction to get Yen Sid out of his office, and then it would come out that Myde had been there at the start of the riot and then it was just a hop, skip, and jump to finding out that he'd yelled mouse and started the whole thing… and then it was just another hop to being flayed alive.

He was not going to die today. He was _not_ going to end up in prison for stealing a stupid book! It sounded like Tseng was going to turn down their hallway and spot them any second—

He had to hide the evidence. Hidehidehide! But where? He couldn't reach the end of the hallway in time and the doors were locked and the only other thing was—and there it was.

Tseng's footsteps were sharp and clear and close as Myde bent down and scooped Ienzo up off the floor, bridal-style.

"What the hell are you—put me down!" Ienzo smacked Myde with the Akashic Record, his aim rather painfully accurate. Myde flinched but held on, running the last three steps down the hallway and apologizing profusely all the way.

Then Myde dumped both boy and book down the hallway laundry chute.

Ienzo admirably held back all but the smallest of shocked shouts, but Myde flinched at every thump and creak until he heard a final _whoomp!_—which he hoped was Ienzo hitting a soft pile of laundry, and not the laundry room floor.

Tseng turned the corner not even ten seconds after the laundry chute door had stopped flapping and Myde had backed into the middle of the hall. He spun to look at the security guard, whose face was cold and measured but very obviously suspicious. Tseng eyed the hallway meticulously from top to bottom, returning to Myde when it was evident there was nothing else to be found.

"Where is Ienzo?" the security guard asked.

Myde procured a gloriously sheepish smile and shrugged. "He just slipped right through my fingers."

Suspicious, but with no proof to detain him, Tseng moved on down the hallway in the direction Myde had so helpfully pointed. When he had vanished around the far corner, Myde breathed a sigh of short-lived relief.

"You are a _dead_ man walking," echoed up the laundry chute.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Ienzo, where did you get that scrape?" Aerith almost reached out to touch the side of his cheek which had been rubbed raw by an unfinished edge in the laundry chute.

"It's nothing," he said, lifting one shoulder in a disinterested shrug. "I fell," he lied smoothly.

"When you were running today…" Aerith looked down and away. She was always so disappointed when he broke the rules, and today must have just seemed like a sharp slap—for him to cause trouble during such a tumultuous situation, when she had trusted him… If Ienzo had been the type to feel guilt, he would have felt it now.

Instead he only felt unstable, full of restless, manic energy that coursed out of him as an occasional shudder. He felt as if he hadn't slept in days; his visual processing was sluggish and a headache was forming behind his left eye. The worst was the deep down sense of revulsion for his own body—it felt like his bones had been torn up from under his skin and soaked in darkness, returned black as pitch and reeking of sulfur and rotting flesh. He could feel the darkness on his skin: the dancing legs of spiders, or claws meant to rend, to…

He crushed another shudder and wished Aerith would just leave. With her here, he could not even go back to pouring over the Akashic Record as a distraction from his repetitive and unsolvable train of thought.

He had opened a portal. But he could not do so willingly. It was not like he hadn't genuinely intended to in the hallway, or afterward when (a distinctly bruised and battered) Myde had brought him back to the violet room. He had tried, drawing on every innate sense and memory, yet he still could not replicate the event. The only conclusion he could come to was that the resurgence of the ability was linked to genuine physical or mental duress.

Or that he was somehow blocking the ability on the subconscious level. But this second option was not honestly worth considering. He wanted nothing more than to… than to what?

He wished Aerith would just leave. The Akashic Record was burning a hole in the back of his mind. He shifted further away from where she sat beside his bed.

"Why did you do that?" Aerith had this way of staring straight into a person even when he was looking away. "It doesn't seem like something you would do…"

He stared at the opposite wall, half-covered with words. "What is it," he mused, "that I want to do?"

Aerith looked taken aback, and she had every reason to—in all the time she had been his doctor he had never asked her a question like that, one she couldn't answer with facts.

She stared for a moment, turning responses over and over in her head. In situations like these, she knew what do according to standard medical practice—turn the question back, start a discussion based on previously established information, get the patient talking—but she also knew that Ienzo was not a textbook case and that she… she genuinely wanted him to have answers to his questions.

At the moment Aerith opened her mouth to form some sort of reply, Ienzo looked over. "That was rhetorical, don't answer it."

The room fell into a cold, thin silence, like the unnatural quiet of snowy nights, the brittle, bracing sound of high altitudes. Even though nothing had changed in room, Aerith found it almost difficult to breathe. For a long moment, Ienzo looked at her without blinking, his eyes darker than she had ever seen, the individual strands of his hair lost in the shadows thrown up by the dying sunlight, and behind him, despite the darkness, the words on the wall stood out to her in sharp relief—a tale, a testament, a warning.

Over his head, the black lettering beat like wings of a massive dark bird.

_And then Sora came to Castle Oblivion._

_And then Sora_… Aerith felt something inside herself twinge painfully, well up, like her heart was pressing hard against her ribs, and what was most horrible about it all was that she didn't know why; she didn't know if it was fear or sadness or something else entirely that held her breath in her throat. _And then Sora…_

She knew the rest. And then Sora drew Riku to him, and Axel betrayed them all, and Zexion died. That was where it ended.

_Something is going to happen._

Aerith was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling, an innate knowledge that lifted the fine hairs on the backs of her arms. Something was coming, crawling toward them all with slow and persevering purpose, blood and horror and endings on its mind... Something was going to happen. And she didn't like that she didn't know what.

"That question wasn't rhetorical," she murmured, just to say something.

Ienzo had long since turned away. "No, it wasn't," he said, "but you don't have the answer." He was sitting toward the window, one knee bent, holding his head up with the back of one hand.

"I guess…" Aerith frowned, "…I guess I don't."

If Ienzo had been himself, he would have taken that opportunity to ask Aerith why she was even there then, worded in a way that questioned her very existence, was significantly demotivating and sufficiently sarcastic, cruel enough to drive her from the room so he could go back to reading. Instead he said nothing, and Aerith thought that spoke volumes. And the high, cold silence was back.

"I actually came here…" She hurried to fill the gap. "I came to ask if you and Myde had something to do with what happened today." She tried not to sound accusatory, but it was bit hard to pull that off. "Myde was acting strange all morning, and you were acting strange at lunch… Our kitchen definitely doesn't have any mice. It's suspicious."

He dismissed her with a flick of his free hand. "What would we have gained from starting a riot?"

"That's what scares me." Aerith smiled despite herself.

"I imagine this suspicion is all just instinct on your part?" he asked, still not bothering to look back at her.

Aerith hesitated to nod. "The lack of explanation or evidence sounds a lot like your touch."

"And the full-tilt mayhem was Myde's?" he scoffed.

She shifted in the teal chair, straightening her skirt. "No, I don't think he would do something like that… on his own…"

Ienzo almost rolled his eyes. "So you suppose I what—bribed him elegant prose? Or did he do it because I asked him nicely?"

Aerith did not appreciate his sarcasm—he didn't even have to look at her to feel her suddenly growing sterner than she had been when they'd started their conversation. He could trace the line of her frown, the barest furrow in her brow without even turning. It was almost unpleasant, knowing that he had seen that expression on her face enough times to recreate it without thought.

"If you had anything to do with what happened today… I highly doubt you asked Myde whether he wanted to be involved or not. You just manipulate… and Myde's the kind of person who wouldn't have said no if you _had_ asked nicely." She was not yelling, not even close, but it was not quiet or sweet or anything but that sort of hot, angry worry people got when they knew the ones they were concerned for didn't deserve and didn't want concern in the first place.

"It was one thing with Marlene and kitchen duty—" he could feel her eyes malachite cold on his back "—but what happened today was on an entirely different scale. People were running, things were thrown, fights broke out. Someone could have been seriously injured—it's a miracle no one was!" Aerith could be good at guilt when she wanted to be.

"I don't recall developing a conscience since we last spoke," he offered, blandly, his mind on the conversation except for the part that was concentrating on looking just above the sun where it was slowly sinking behind the buildings and what little he could see of the horizon.

"Ienzo!" And he thought maybe that was real anger—not that he was qualified to discern. "If someone had gotten injured and if Yen Sid knew it was you and Myde, it wouldn't be just a warning. You both would be in serious trouble." Her voice had broken into pleading; he could feel her leaning forward, genuine and honest and all together too involved. "At the very least… Myde would have to leave. You would never see him again. That's what you're risking."

She couldn't see him tense, but he did, the fingers of his idle hand pressing into his starched blankets. He knew, he knew what the final cost could be; that was why he'd been so damn careful, why he had made the plan so intricate, so Myde would give up before he'd started or so he'd get it right, perfectly right, and leave nothing but vague suspicions in his wake, and he'd been careful, he'd thought about it, and he'd wanted…

He'd been careful.

"I don't see why the loss of Myde Cistern would concern me," was what he said out loud.

Aerith jerked as if he'd slapped her, and yes, that had to be real anger now, because he knew that had been a flat-out lie, but apparently Aerith hadn't.

"You say a lot of things that I don't think are true," she murmured, professional despite. "Every day since he has been here, you've… The way you act around him…you would never act that way around me, even though I've known you for so long. It's obvious that you care about… what happens to him." Her stare might as well have been a world on his shoulders. He could feel her moving to clasp her hands in her lap.

"If Myde had to leave, it would… affect you."

Ienzo had nothing to say in reply, but that didn't mean he wasn't listening, and Aerith knew it. She wanted him to look at her, but when he was resolute about these things, there was no way to change his mind.

"So please, Ienzo—" it was personal; it was personal with her now, after this long, and he wished it wasn't, but he couldn't stop something he never encouraged in the first place, "—please _stop_. Just follow the rules, for once. Don't put anyone else at risk. Don't force Myde to put himself at risk."

The silence was a palpable beat, traveling down from the ceiling to the floor and then spilling outward.

"This is all," he said finally, "just your personal speculation."

"Yes," Aerith admitted again. "Tseng was suspicious as well. He tried to question Myde a bit, but…" and there was the barest hint of her smile, and the tension in the room sharply dropped. "But Myde was squeaking and 'umm'ing so much we couldn't get a real word out of him."

_Never let it again be said that a coward's tongue bleeds secrets_, Ienzo thought.

"But!" Aerith stood with a flounce that would have never suited another woman her age, and steadied her hands on her hips. She was not smiling, but that was all right, because even looking at her from the corner of his eye, he could tell that they'd all scraped through again. There was nothing official to link he and Myde to the crime, so the intern was not getting fired, no one had noticed the Akashic Record had taken up residence with his socks and shoes under the bed, and Aerith did not have to bring anyone to real justice because the worst that happened was the loss of a couple old tables and a day's worth of cooking supplies.

"But!" she said again. "Just because there's nothing to prove you two were involved doesn't mean you're off the hook!" She was trying not to smile—whether the smile would have been one of amusement or justly meted retribution, Ienzo didn't bother to wonder. "You and Myde are on heavy cleaning duty until the kitchen and the cafeteria are spic and span."

_Justly meted retribution wins._

"And…" Her only recently revived cheer stumbled a little. "Yen Sid and the security staff decided that our ward wasn't prepared to handle a situation of that scale. So… some new security guards are going to be joining us. Though it'll probably mean even more supervision over you… don't antagonize them, okay?"

"No promises," he muttered, turning back to watch the window again, disinterested in both the turn of conversation and what he could see of the outside world.

Aerith hadn't expected anything more. She nodded, although he wasn't looking, and headed for the door. At the door she turned back to wish him good night, and in a second she was nearly pitched forward into a deep, dark roiling mass crawling upward from below, and crawling_crawling_, and all she could see of Ienzo were his eyes, which glinted yellow from a light that didn't exist or she couldn't find, and the dark writhed and bubbled and reeked and liquefied the furniture and then the walls of the violet room and then Ienzo's body, layer by layer—seeping through the epidermis, the muscular coat, the epithelial tissue, osteon—and then it swallowed the whites of his eyes and he just stared at her, unchanging, his pupils luminous and yellow, disinterested, and then gone entirely.

Then there was nothing left except the unbroken darkness, and that was when Aerith realized she could blink again.

Her vision cleared immediately, the violet room blooming back into focus as if she'd just come out of a particularly bad case of tunnel vision. The room _was_ dark, but naturally so—the sun had set and neither of them bothered to turn on the lights, leaving pools of shadows everywhere the last dying glow couldn't reach. Ienzo didn't stand out against the blankets, but the dark on him was just nightfall, nothing moving or caustic or purely, utterly evil.

Ienzo hadn't moved; his back still faced her and Aerith could not see his eyes. For a moment she considered asking him to turn around, to look at her, so she could prove that… that what? He wasn't turning into smoke and ash and rotting right in front of her? That he wasn't about to lose himself to the shadows in the corners?

She was being ridiculous, turned around too quickly, let the last of the new paint smell get to her. She'd mistaken sunset for some sort of cosmic devourer.

_It's been a long day_, Aerith thought. And then, _But. But, what was…_

And before she realized it, she'd already asked, "Did something happen to you today?" This time, she saw him tense from neck to ankle. After a high, cold moment, he turned his head to look at her from the corner of his eye—instead of cobalt, she saw navy blue, or his pupils dilated in response to the darkness.

"I fell," he lied smoothly.

That was not what she meant. They both knew it. Ienzo didn't say anything else.

Finally, Aerith opened the door, mustered a smile, and wished him good night. Like a starving dog, traces of sulfur and dead things chased her heels into the hall.

_Something_, she thought, _is happening_.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Swinging the keys to the Twilight Gale around his index finger, Myde shuffled through the garage, staring mournfully at the empty space where Flounder had once happily listed. It still wasn't back from Highwind Repairs, where he'd taken it after the accident with the Dancers. Cloud insisted his boss (and shop owner), Cid Highwind, was working hard on it. But it must have needed a lot of work—when Myde had called a couple of days ago, he'd been met by a hail storm of curse words which amounted, as best as he could tell, to the repairs taking at least another week.

Taking a car to work had its advantages (he didn't have to get up two hours in advance), but… Myde missed Flounder. Commuting just wasn't the same without it.

With a sigh of sheer relief, Myde kicked off his Converse in the hall and slouched toward the kitchen for a glass of cold water. Today had been much, much too long. But he'd survived, miraculously. They'd pulled off Ienzo's ridiculous plot, and he'd even made it through the fifth degree with Tseng without giving anything serious away. Sure he now had a new set of bruises courtesy of one incredibly pissed off Ienzo once he'd finally gotten out of the laundry room, but since Rufus Memorial rarely failed to damage him in some way, even that didn't seem like anything special.

Leaning against the kitchen island, staring off into the middle distance, Myde felt sorta… badass. He'd started a riot. He'd robbed Yen Sid. He'd tossed Ienzo down a laundry chute. And best of all, he'd lived to tell the tale. It occurred to him belatedly that he shouldn't be grinning stupidly over accomplishing things that were, well… _bad_, but he couldn't resist. It felt good to do things right, even if the things themselves were wrong.

And even though he'd accepted Ienzo's story three weeks ago, he now had undeniable proof that he was not the only one who could do things normal human beings couldn't. He'd encountered the Dancers—but Ienzo had portaled. The Dancers were one thing—according to Ienzo (and what he himself could remember), Lesser Nobodies had free will; they chose to serve on their own, and they would go where they pleased if they weren't commanded otherwise. The Dancers had mostly come to him because they wanted to be near him, not because he'd used his power to forcibly summon them.

But Ienzo had reached into the well of the magic he'd sworn they had and _done_ something. He'd opened a Corridor of Darkness. He'd walked (okay, run) through it. Human beings couldn't do things like that. Even people like the Keyblade master hadn't been able to do that, because they were creatures of light. Only those without hearts could walk that path—or those seeped in darkness.

Ienzo had opened a Corridor of Darkness. He did not have a heart.

They really and truly were Nobodies, not some pale imitation of their former selves.

When he thought about it like that, he thought he might have understood Ienzo's manic laughter a bit more. Even if he'd believed it, having something like that confirmed so brutally… it hurt, like a blow to the face. They were not human. According to the universe and all the cosmic definitions of reality, they did not even exist. Myde pulled a glass from the cabinet and, crossing to the refrigerator, threw a couple badly-formed ice cubes into it.

And he hadn't even meant to. That was what got to Myde most—Ienzo had opened the portal reflexively, as if it were some instinct carved into the very core of their non-beings. It was there, probably, in both of them, and it had been there from the very beginning.

The bottled water he pulled from the fridge was so cold it hissed when he opened it. It splashed over the ice cubes, cracking them instantly and sending tendrils of mist up the side of the glass.

The power to control the Corridors of Darkness was there. Had been there.

What else, Myde thought, was still there?

The water in the glass was clear, still, innocuous. He could almost feel the ice melting. Something inside him stirred (a flash of stained glass in the darkness, someone laughing, notes droning on and on), and Myde could not have stopped himself then if he wanted to.

He hummed. The glass shattered. Every drop of water that had been in it hung, glittering, in the air around him.

Demyx had been a water mage. Myde had remembered that, and he could_ hear_ it now.

Myde could hear it in every droplet swirling lazily in place—hear the infinite pulse of the liquid molecules spinning and crashing and ducking around and over and away from each other at a breath-taking frequency, humming in the air higher and faster, slower and sharper than any song he had ever heard before, beating and beating and beating—

The most beautiful melody in all the worlds.

And he could _change_ it. He tilted his head and the sound soared, the droplets rose and fell on tempo; he flicked a wrist and the sound swooped into ranges lower than he had ever heard before; the water dashed across the room and back—he could change the song faster than he could chords on a guitar. Faster, just by thinking it, just by moving...

He shrugged a shoulder, bopped his head, tapped his toes, and the sound became a pounding club rhythm, the water swirling and stabbing, bouncing and shining in the late afternoon sunlight, giving off a heated, irresistible, upbeat sound only he could hear.

And he could hear it everywhere—not just in the water from the glass flashing around the room but from the air itself, from himself, water vapor and the liquid inside him straining to join the melody, all of it, all of it his to conduct by ear.

Myde danced. It wasn't professional, some bizarre mix of the pasa doble and jumpstyle, but it was his like the water was his, and it all made such an infectious sound—he couldn't resist, jumped and kicked and shook and laughed to the time of water splashing up and over and around and everywhere from the ceiling to the floor. He pulled more and more water from the air, from nowhere, throwing it around with every toss of his wrists, bounce of his feet, swish of his hips. The water clung around him in beads like diamonds, flickering, flying…

"Dance water, dance!"

And all of it humming through his head like the highest energy club song he'd ever heard.

Myde felt free and pure and powerful and_ right_. The smile on his face was so big it hurt. He didn't get hot, he didn't tire, he didn't want to ever stop dancing or hearing—the sound of two sharp, low breaths being drawn in somewhere behind him, shattering the ethereal music.

He froze, and the water shuddered to a stop, halting its forward-up-down-backward motion to spin lazily, glittering in the air around him like a giant's idea of confetti. He turned slowly, on one heel, his other still half extended from a jaunty kick. And though he knew what he would see, any bracing was meaningless when he looked back to the kitchen doorway and met first Yuffie's wide-flung eyes… and then his mother's.

The last traces of his tremulous concentration snapped, and several tens of gallons of water dropped straight down onto the kitchen floor—and the kitchen island, and the counters, and all the appliances, and Myde himself, in a very, very audible splash.

It poured in waterfalls off the edges of the island, pooled in the bowl-like seats of the tall stools, threatened the contents of their spice holder, dripped off the hands of the clock on the wall, and ran across the floor in an inch deep river, rushing toward the hall. The water flowed over Mariana's patent blue pumps and Yuffie's sneakers, but neither of them so much as flinched.

It was Wednesday. His mother came home early on Wednesdays. Yuffie liked to con him into doing her homework on Wednesdays. He had forgotten everything but the infectious melody of his own magic. And now…

The whole room was very, very still except for the drops sluggishly falling from chairs and curtains and the tips of his hair.

Yuffie's eyes swept desperately between the water and Myde and back again. Mariana's stare offered him no chance to look away.

They had seen him. They had seen him conducting a cosmic song they couldn't hear, using his body to redefine the laws of the world, choreographing measured steps for the chaotic life they never even knew water _had_. They had seen him acting anything but human.

"What the heck is—"

"Myde…" Mariana managed above Yuffie's outcry, but her voice trailed off into nothing. "How did you…"

He was cold and wet and _trapped_.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ģłίŧŧεŗίηġ – Ğεηεŗąłίŧγ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

1) I **owe so much to DistortedGaze** for giving so much of her time to deal with crap like this.

3) Two amazing TVR readers (Plasmodesmata and Apertureboo) have actually _**brought the violet room to life**_ by covering their violet wall with incredible writing and art. Pictures and a link to the script for the wall are up in my profile—go look! You'll be stunned at their skill and effort, just like I am.

4) **Trivia:** Ienzo's breakdown in the last chapter was (an attempted) imitation of William Faulkner's stream of conscious style as employed in the 1929 novel _The Sound and the Fury_. A lot of people got this, but no one matched the lack of punctuation and syntax to Quentin Compson, who happens to be my favorite literary character. Ever. The chapter's title "Art of the Arcane," is an English translation of "Ars Arcanum," one of Sora's abilities in KHI. _**In this chapter:**_ Ienzo starts to use an oft-quoted phrase with an oft-forgotten literary origin. In which book was the phrase "Oh, how the mighty have fallen" first used?

**Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alerts list!**


	8. Golden Hammer

_Please note:_**This chapter is unbeta'd. **I am reluctantly posting it now because, honestly, it's lame that I haven't updated in eleven months, and the continued reviews, messages, and works from fans have finally convinced me that something is probably better than nothing at all. I warn you ahead of time that what you are about to read may be full of adjectives, OOC, and things which don't make sense—and all of it, including major plot, is _subject to change_. When the revised version is available, I will try and let everyone know. Until then, **please leave me some constructive criticism**, so that I can make improvements! Thank you all for being so very patient with me.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħą__ρ__τ__ε__ŕ III_

Vąłžεŗ – Đεłłε – Ǿ ŗ ε – ( Äłłεġŗσ ) :

Ģσłđεη – Ĥąммεŗ

This chapter is dedicated to Indiesin and AllieReade.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

"Go home Yuffie."

He couldn't look at his mother's face. Her voice was friction and sandpaper.

"But—" He couldn't look at Yuffie either; he knew how she was staring, even without lifting his eyes from the sluggish drip off the cutting board—she'd be darting back and forth between he and his mother, not sure who to confront. The crease between her brows would be deep, and her lips a solid pout.

"Go home," Mariana said again.

Yuffie choked on air. Myde could feel her watching him, her curiosity driving prickling nails into every exposed centimeter of his skin. His arms crossed of their own accord, fingers reaching to hug ribs through his sopping wet t-shirt. He counted the drops falling from the counter.

"You can talk to Myde later." Where her voice should have gone soft around the edges, it was all rivets and points. "Right now my son and I need to be alone."

The words sent a bolt down his spine, as cruel and fast as any of Larxene's outbursts—_which one was Larxene again?_ And although he wanted horribly to be out from under Yuffie's stare, another thought echoed over and over again in his head: he did not want to be alone with his mother.

Yuffie's sneakers sloshed as she scuffed them on the marble. The minute ripples washed over him like foghorns over the long, dark sea—_what's the sea?_

He heard her leave then, shedding tinkling drops of water down the hall. He didn't know if he would ever be able to speak to her again.

Myde watched his mother's patent blue pumps turn navy as the water crept higher through the fabric. There was this moment and then nothing else: he tried to see his life, his mother's life beyond this wet kitchen and what welled up was an all-encompassing blank. How could they move forward when he knew for certain he couldn't move at all?

The kitchen was so agonizingly silent—the dripping trailing off, his mother's breath forcibly contained—that he thought it might all just break suddenly, shatter at the weak points, crumble away into the infinite, hungry darkness like so much glittering dust. He couldn't even hear his own heart, his furious heart rushing in his temples, tingling at the ends of his fingers. And he had never imagined silence could be so loud. It threatened to tear through his eardrums, drown out his thoughts, chatter him to trembling bone—it would be now, or now, or now when it would grow even louder and just undo him, now—_please. now._

It shattered—the silence, Myde, Mariana, the kitchen, the world—when his mother took a slow, single step backward. Myde felt the air rush out of him as if someone had taken a sledge hammer to his ribs. Drawing in breath was a nearly insurmountable feat. He still couldn't look her in the eye.

"The kitchen is ruined," she said at long last. It was not a peace offering, not a way in, not a question. Myde kept very still. He felt more than saw her enter the room then, sharp but slow, and sweep water from the seat of a bar stool with a stiff hand.

But she didn't say anything else, and he felt her eyes setting on him like heavy, jagged stones. She was waiting. But for what? Myde's voice was lost in the oppressive air—he opened his mouth, suddenly filled by the horrible knowledge that she was waiting for _him_, for some explanation, for something to sway her judgment, convince her she was dreaming. Myde opened his mouth, but no sound would come out; he swallowed around the growing lump in his throat. An unintelligible, breathless squeak clawed its way out of him.

And she waited.

"I can—" he flinched, frightened by the burst of his own voice at long last. "I can fix it."

_Can I really?_

"The kitchen?" Mariana asked, although what she was really asking was _All of it?_

Myde nodded, weak, and then thought better. "The kitchen," he clarified miserably. His eyes darted up to the firm, unmoving line of her chin before his courage gave out and his gaze fell again.

"Do you want—" his throat caught. "Do you want to leave?" She was as motionless as marble carvings. Myde waited a beat, desperately willing her away, but now it was obvious that his mother had no intention of covering her eyes—now it was obvious what she was really waiting for. Myde shuddered. For a half second he thought about _asking_ her to leave—but where would the courage to do that come from?

Demyx was so…

The whole roll of paper towels on the holder was ruined. The digital displays on the microwave and stove flickered ominously. If he didn't clean up the mess now, the entire kitchen would need replacing.

Myde braced himself, turned away from his mother. And then he snapped his fingers—a joyless, echoing sound that struck the corners of the room and stuck there, embedded itself in his ears, the darkest and most secret parts of his brain. The water jerked bonelessly, a dead thing seizing back into life, and with a screeching crescendo that made his teeth shake, both sound and water vanished completely. The paper towels hung unmarred on the holder, the spice rack breathed a sigh of relief, his hair lifted off his neck and face, and his mother's high heels stood dry on a bone dry floor.

Mariana did not so much as gasp. Myde felt bile burning its way up his throat. He met his mother's eyes at last, and thought about dying.

Her eyes were half narrowed, steady; she seemed to have foregone the need to blink. Dark make-up turned the sage of her irises a murky color, impossible to see beyond. And she looked at him as if she did not know him, as if she had wandered into her own kitchen and found a stranger, or a face she'd once seen in a crowd, a man whose name she'd never known or wanted to know. Her lips were a thin, bloodless line. He might as well have been an animal to her—a snake whose venomosity she could not gauge, wary of the slightest hint of movement. She was anchored in the vast darkness between horror and morbid awe.

Myde felt his knees tremble. His chest was too heavy, crushing his lungs. His eyes prickled. He looked away, forced himself into one jerking step and then another and another. Even though he went around the opposite side of the kitchen island, his mother shrank back when he neared. He made it to the doorway without stumbling, but his whole body weighed him down as if he had come a thousand miles.

"I'm sorry," he choked. And then he ran.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

At first, Ienzo didn't know why he was outside, and then he didn't care. The outdoor light was strange for a desert, he thought (in a way that echoed): it was all over the soft greys of old, old films. The sky was a flat sheet of concrete, devoid of moon or stars or sun. Where he stood in the infinite, empty expanse, he cast no shadow. Beneath his feet—bare (where were his shoes?)—the sand was cool, loose, and colorless. With some small difficulty—the sand was _too_ loose, permeable as the surface of a vast lake—Ienzo began to walk. He did not know where he was going, but that did not seem cause to stop and think. Far away in the distance something was sparkling blue and gold.

He walked forever; he walked through an eon, the world just beyond his plane of sight rising, eroding, completely remade. Nothing changed here, where there was no water and no wind. His footprints extended for years behind him. He didn't get tired or hungry or thirsty. This did not seem strange.

But even though he had been approaching it forever, the great span of water took him by surprise. It stretched out, as long as the desert through which he had traveled, boundless to his left and right. The horizon before him was imposed only for his benefit, to give some sense of the maddening scale of the place. The light here too was odd; the water was dark, and where it welled up, it shone gold and orange and pink. A path of light along its surface implied a glorious sunset which he could not see. The foam that licked his toes was cold and glittering but had no scent.

Far down the beach—no, not far at all—under a tree heavy with star-shaped fruit, the faded forms of two children were play sword-fighting. That was supposed to mean something, only he couldn't remember what. His thoughts shook like television static.

_The time when you will open the [_] is both far away and very near._

The pale desert world shuddered, flickered out for a moment, and what was lay beyond it were pink and orange clouds burning with the sunset, splashed across a real blue-purple-peach-yellow sky in artistic swirls, arches, pillows. The sun fell heavy on the horizon, dulled to permit the eye, bleeding out halos of gold and red. The boundless sea threw salt into his face on the heels of cool spray. Beside and before him, greens lighter than cores of kiwi fruit and dark enough to seem black meshed without rhyme or reason, becoming the glowing foliage of a tropical island forest.

_But do not be afraid, for you have [_]._

Ienzo realized, without warning, that there was something he had lost and was supposed to find. Only he couldn't remember what.

The world crackled and jumped like bad reception, laying bland nothingness over the vibrant island again. The children swam in a heat mirage. And then it all fell very dark—utter darkness that flooded without mercy over the tropical trees, the fine sand, the toy swords. It boiled up from under the sparkling surface of the sea and washed up on the shore, a great mouth of black swallowing the worlds.

There was no ground beneath Ienzo's feet, no sky or horizon, way to mark up or down. His eyes might have been open or closed; the unadulterated black leeched all sensation from him until he could not feel his hands—drifting somewhere—his feet, or the strange brush of his own eyelashes against his cheeks.

The darkness howled: the voices of old machinery, nervous clamoring and the roars of behemoths or wind through empty tunnels in the night. Ienzo came undone in degrees, unraveling into spools of thread, dissolving to night vapor, simply disappearing, until he was indistinguishable from the darkness that held him.

"Is something the matter, Number VI?" a voice said.

With all the inexplicable and abrupt prescience of dreams, Ienzo remembered and remembered:

—_fear is a feeling like falling, the edge of a sheer divide, an eyeful of the reaching pitch dark, a long day's journey into night_—

How had he even for a moment forgotten who—_Ienzo_**Zexion**Ienzo_(?)_—forgotten that he was a Nobody, that it was his heart he should be seeking, that he did not belong_ (belong?) _in a timeless desert or on a warm shore or even in the infinite dark, but should be at this very moment in a familiar hospital room being treated for an insanity that was true and therefore stranger?

And how had he ever forgotten _this_, what it felt like to be _afraid_, more familiar than the lines of his own palms?

"Number VI?"

He knew fear—he _knew_, with or without a heart, and it was all deceit, the idea of emotionlessness, because he had the feeling right here, not the product of old memories but fresh fear, inching up his throat, sitting on his chest, ringing in his ears—

"Zexion."

His eyes snapped open at last to the voice that had called him_(?) _from the dark, and he was very suddenly in the Grey Area of Castle Never Was. The glass beneath his gloves was cold enough to feel, an anchor, a ward against the man across the room—

"Lord Xemnas is calling." Saïx stood against the far wall with no pretense of care, his mouth a cruel line, the slant of his body against the grey humming with the effort to contain a malice broad and barren and cold as winter moonlight. If all Nobodies were shells, Saïx was something beyond, the steel cast of a man built to enclose an indignant fury and old wounds, half-madness and unquiet regrets, all supposedly far enough away to be nothing but shadows.

But that was _more_ disturbing, Zexion thought. That was _more _disturbing, because shadows were, by their very nature, deceptive, easily disguised and not to be trusted—a shadow might just as well mislead as betray the truth. And if they made up for it with loyalty, well that was not saying much: they pursued only their own casters from birth _(rebirth?)_ to the grave; one shadow could never be taught to obey a new master.

And it was shadows that had brought them here in the first place, so if all Saïx had was an old bitter and fresh jealous shade, Zexion thought he should be considered more, not less, dangerous.

_Dangerous? _Something deep inside him—settled in the hollow where his heart used to be, a ghost of malleable grey-white flesh—shrieked in the half-silent, monstrous true Nobody voice—

_ togetherstrength alliesorganization together togetherbrothers theoneness incomplete! _

—revolting against the word, the very idea of casting suspicion on another of its kind, absolutely unwilling to risk the stability of the whole. Zexion crushed that voice into the back of his head as swiftly as he could; he was nowhere near naïve enough to believe that Nobodies' ingrained fierce devotion—basic survival instinct—applied unconditionally to those of his and Saïx's sort. Only an idealist would have claimed they shared any sort of loyalty, and anyone with more than a handful of brain cells knew that trusting Saïx was safe only outside of his appalling strike range, but…

Saïx was privy to none of the thoughts warring in Zexion's head. He surveyed the shorter man from where he stood with a calculated dispassion, his gaze sharp and level despite the distance between them.

"We are gathering," he said finally, insisting on the last word in a conversation they hadn't had. Before Zexion could reply—if he had intentions of doing so—Saïx turned and disappeared into the white halls, a swirl of dark leather against the drifting noon sky of his hair. When he had gone, his footsteps echoing into nothing, the desperate pride which had kept Zexion on his feet gave out. He slid to the floor, grateful more than ever for the room's emptiness. He laid back against the window, trying to still the rush of blood in his temples, the sensation of being cornered, borne down upon by a set of flecked fangs.

Anyone with more than a handful of brain cells knew that trusting Saïx was a dangerous thing, but Zexion had never before felt—been _threatened_. When the other members had filtered out of the room and Saïx had moved at last to look at him—his body unchanged, his shoulders loose, no excessive disdain in his frowning—he had met Zexion's eye and for half a moment, a flicker, his jaundiced gaze had howled in the dim _disgust_ _resentment_ _hatred_ and above all a cold and smug _farewell_, as if Saïx had been looking at a dead man. Zexion had felt, in that moment, the claymore falling, the heavy thud, the chill of metal at his throat and he had known without explanation—believed, thought, could not forget—that Saïx wanted nothing more than to see him die.

He'd stilled, found himself trapped, and Saïx only stared, washing over the look that begged for blood with a civilized and thin calm; Zexion had felt—remembered (_fear is a feeling like_)—and the shadow of the emotion had overcome him, shrieking—

_What is it that you're afraid of?_ a voice said in the empty castle room, and it echoed in the corners and over the barren couches. It multiplied, grew until it slammed against his ears no matter how he tried to cover them, until it shook the window-wall in its frame, shook and shattered it in a sparkling swell that blew a million shards of glass out into the black sky, a mockery of stars.

And he was falling. Backward. Again into the infinite dark.

_Are you afraid of dying?_ the voice asked, empathy from a source he couldn't name.

His gloves were gone; his hands that reached for the distant light of the half-formed moon were bare except for lasting smudges of black ink, and no, he knew by now that death was something that didn't stick—

The glass stars were fading.

_Then are you afraid of being_—

Ienzo woke with a jolt from the dream, sore where the railing at the head of the bed had furrowed into his back, and where the wall had been unyielding against his craned neck. His sleep-blurred eyes turned the parking lot lights outside the window into humming fireworks, fading in and out of focus. What he could see of the broken Dawn City horizon had a tinge of early-night blue that meant he had not been sleeping long.

A shudder crawled its way down his spine without permission, as slow and purposeful as spider's legs. Axel was the one who'd facilitated his death, but Ienzo remembered now: it had been Saïx who sent him to the slaughter.

He should have wanted to write, should have leapt for the marker in the chair across the room and spilled out the addendum floating sharp in his mind, the last minute thoughts to make sense of his madman's death—but his hands shook when he lifted them, and when he swallowed heavily, his mouth was dry enough to crack. The Akashic Record tumbled from his lap onto the floor; he must have fallen asleep reading. Without thought or will, his fingernails buried themselves in the flesh of his arms, dragging red lines from his elbows beneath the unadulterated white of his hospital wear.

He could not shake the sensation of eyes resting contemptuously on him. As if he were already dead. Forgotten.

His body moved again without his willing it, slumping over the side of the bed to unfurl the nightstand drawer; the spare markers inside rolled and clattered against the telephone—its cord was pulled tight through the back of the drawer and into the wall, anchoring it all so that, even if tempted, he could never make drawer or phone into a weapon. The receiver's cord was fixed too, so short he had to bow half into the nightstand to brace it against his ear. He fingers shook so badly he had to rest on the red front desk button before he was sure enough to press it.

"Miss Mulan," his voice was thick and hoarse enough to surprise him into a half second of silence. "I need an outside line."

"Ah, who is this?" the night receptionist questioned slowly, as if she suspected she was supposed to know; there was a distant clatter of a clipboard and papers and a quiet "Oops!" that Ienzo assumed was her dropping the room number chart.

"This is Ienzo Amaryllis," he had to force the words forward, obviating her efforts, "from the third floor."

"I can't—" Mulan began, but Ienzo's patience had run itself to nothing.

"Li Shang, in the physical therapy unit… there are some things you would rather he not learn, aren't there?" It was cold, Ienzo knew, but he did not mean to make good on the threat and he needed—

Mulan gave a stifled hum, half way between frustration and nerves. "If anyone asks, you figured out the phone system on your own," she warned at last, her voice dulled to a hiss-whisper as if the security staff could see right through her actions from their scattered placement around the hospital.

There was another distant scrabbling sound, a mispressed button, and then the dial tone he had been seeking all along. With less trepidation than he should have had, Ienzo dialed the one number he knew and had never planned on calling.

"Please enjoy the music while your party is reached," an automated woman's voice chimed, fading beneath the bouncing scratch of a synthesizer and a woman's voice piping out words he could not focus enough to understand.

The singer and the music were cut off by Myde's voice.

"Er, hi! This is Myde!" Ienzo almost opened his mouth to speak, but the voice went on. "Well, this is not really Myde, because I'm not really here right now; this is just a recording, but… Shoot, what was I saying? Anyway, you should leave me a message or something, because otherwise I'll probably forget you called. Er, yeah. Bye!"

"At the tone, please record your message," the automated voice returned. "When you are finished, hang up or—"

Ienzo couldn't think of a thing to say. He hung up before the message finished playing and closed the nightstand drawer quietly. He lay back in bed, the covers still made beneath him, and a blank sort of confusion seeped into his mind.

He had been expecting Myde to answer. Although he had never called before—although he had no idea if Myde even carried his phone and Myde had never promised to answer, Ienzo had… had expected him to be there. He couldn't decide what was most startling: that he was close enough to Myde to make unconscious assumptions, or that his assumptions had been proven false.

Something about it felt wrong. Something he couldn't name and didn't want to name rang a jarring note in the back of his head. Never mind that Myde was the forgetful type and probably had just left his phone somewhere he couldn't find it, never mind that he could be out with friends (Myde had those, Ienzo reminded himself) and just too busy to answer, never mind. Something was wrong about it all and Myde should have been there.

_As if— _

It wasn't a feeling that swept over Ienzo, not really worry—it was a sort of certain dread almost, the lifting of a few fine hairs on the back on his neck, a pressure that made him wet his lips in a nervous habit he didn't have. If Myde was not there, there had to be a reason. _—Vexen was gone and Lexaeus was dark ash, drifting—_

Ienzo was on his feet (cold against the tile floor) before he'd thought about it, and moving before he felt it, and he reached the door, determined—to do what? Find Myde? Make sure he was… Demand an explanation for why he was not there when Ienzo had needed—needed what?—but the door handle would not turn, and the red light of the lock went on blinking without pause.

_ his life was—_

Ienzo had never really considered himself a prisoner until that moment, when something inside him was shrieking

_together incomplete onenesstogether together_

and he knew he had to go because he could not and Demyx would have to answer and why the hell wouldn't the door just open and he

_ couldn't _

_** get **_

out.

He saw more than felt himself slamming down on the door handle as if he could break the lock, but the effort grew more difficult each time; his breath quickened in his throat until it felt as if he might choke on air itself. He stumbled back, black spots sparking in his eyes, gasping for one good steady breath, and it occurred to him suddenly that he could die like this, in the dark violet room, overwhelmed by the shadows of abandonment and inability, without a voice, a message _(dead? all along?)_ and who would find him? Because Demyx would not answer.

—_already forgotten._

Some part, far away, that remembered more and had lived longer urged him to be calm, but Ienzo clawed his way into the teal chair and curled in on himself, suffocating on the thought again and again that he was trapped, had been trapped, had always been trapped in _every_ life and the Darkness would not open for him now, because.

_What is it that you're afraid of?_

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde stumbled out of the gated community, the last dredges of sunlight on his heels. He didn't know where he was going, only that he had to go and maybe he'd never come back. Living on his own, on the street, with no one and no place, had to be easier than looking his mother in the eye, than trying to put back together the scattered pieces of their family (and his_ life_, because Yuffie knew his secret too). It was like a whirl of dust motes in a sunbeam, spiraling out and out of the gaps between his cupped fingers.

He saw the sidewalk, lines and cracks lurching by underneath him, but he could not comprehend it—he could hardly feel his own feet moving, and the constriction in his chest seemed like it should have come from anything but physical exertion. He didn't know where he was going, or when it would be all right to stop.

_What do I do?_ he asked again and again. Nothing rose up in answer; no hidden reserve of strength welled up to point him in the right direction. He didn't have a heart to follow here.

Street lights flickered to life above his head, bathing the sidewalk with pools of orange and deep patches of shadow, stretching his own shadow into half-invisible, reed-thin limbs that shivered up garden paths and driveways. The heat of the afternoon lingered, but shudders ran the length of his spine, tugged at his knees, shook his breath. When thoughts came to mind at all, they wheeled like constellations, rising and falling, stuck in repetitive patterns.

Myde's daze was shattered by a piercing shriek that would have brought his hands to his ears if he hadn't immediately recognized it as the sound of brakes. Lost in his desperate thinking, he had stepped out into on-coming traffic. There was no time to leap back, or brace himself, or even curl down protectively; he just stared, uncomprehending, as the lights he had mistaken for approaching street lamps hurtled toward him, accompanied by the driver's furious short pound on the horn.

The car veered around him, swinging into the next lane, tires screeching against the asphalt. Myde's hair and clothes whipped about; the car's side mirror tore a shallow scratch against his left arm as it sped past.

The car skidded to a halt, nearly sideways across two lanes. Myde's breath came back to him in a rush, and his eyes darted over to take in the rest of the traffic stopped just beside him now, drivers furious or horrified at what they had almost been involved in. The sound of a car door opening jerked him around again, and Myde saw the driver he'd stepped in front of clambering out of her car.

"H-HEY!" she shouted, but Myde was already running again, darting over the island and the other side of the road, thankfully empty. "You're really freakin' lucky you know!" her voice trailed after him.

You knew you were in a bad place, he thought, when surviving didn't make you feel much luckier.

He turned the nearest corner and mustered the barest flicker of relief at finding himself in a suburb. It wasn't a neighborhood he knew well—living in the gated community, with a mother prone to over-protection and friends who came from the other side of town, he had never learned the North-side geography well; he had no idea how far he currently was from home. Walking distance, at least, except that he wasn't really sure what walking distance was for a Nobody. And he'd been running most of the way—the passage of time couldn't really help him gauge how far he'd come. He was winded, but that could have been from shock at nearly being hit by a car, or shock at any of the other things that had happened today… He could have been miles or minutes away from his mother, it didn't matter: between them now was a long, dark chasm worse than any physical distance.

The park loomed up almost without warning, a long block or two of shadowy trees and fields. Mounted lights lit up far away basketball courts, being used by a few persistent players, but the rest of the park was dark, and the playgrounds and picnic pavilions were deserted. When he crossed the street, a stray cat leapt out of the walled-in dumpster and slunk away.

Myde didn't know what he was doing, and he couldn't really find it in himself to care. Without bothering to hide from the basketball players or any night guards that might be lurking around to enforce curfew in an hour or so, he wandered toward the playground. A nervous sort of energy was starting to flow in him; his arm just now began to pound painfully where the car's mirror had scraped it. For the first time since his mother and Yuffie had stepped into the kitchen doorway, he felt connected to his own body, to… something _else_, the restless hum of the night mist or the reassuring lapping of the park pond against its concrete edges. Earlier today that little water symphony would have brought a grin to his face, would have made him want to dance; now it left him with a bitter taste in the back of his mouth, a tainted experience.

The squeaking of the playground equipment almost blocked it out, if he pushed hard enough against plastic-coated steel. Stumbling a little in the dark, he clambered up a narrow, curving set of stairs and found himself at the center of the playground structure. A bubbly plastic roof, complete with domed skylight too dirty to see through, was held suspended only a foot or so over his head, helped along by brightly colored metal bars. The floor under his Converse was solid mesh, coated over in scuffed red plastic. In one of the low bar walls, a giant tic-tac-toe board had been set, Xs and Os on yellow rollers.

For a long moment, Myde leaned over the bars, watching the dark, unmoving park as if expecting it to offer up answers to questions he hadn't managed to ask. The moment broke in a desperate rush, and he ached to be doing _something_—he plowed over the suspended bridge to the next part of the playground set, bouncing on each swinging plank, shaking the entire structure; he threw himself across the monkey bars, so low that his feet almost touched the sand. He tore up and up the cramped staircase to the top of the tallest slide. But when he leaned over the slide's spiraling side, it seemed too short, too slow—he leapt from the top instead, dropping clumsily and rolling into the sand. It hurt, but what didn't?

Even though he had never been particularly skilled or brave, Myde climbed to the top of the towering jungle gym and swung from his legs, letting the blood rush to his head until black spots swam in front of his eyes and his fingers tingled, stretching out to the distant ground.

He kicked again and again as hard as he could against the sand until the swing set creaked ominously; he leaned back and pushed his feet out as far as they would go until it seemed as if he were kicking the stars on each swing. As a child he had never, never once had the courage to let go and leap from the swings, not even when he had hardly been moving at all. Distantly he recalled being teased for it. At the very top of the fastest, strongest swing, Myde let go and shoved himself into the air. His head tipped back, eyes full of the black sky, and for a moment he was weightless in the dark, nothing but a momentary glimmer, a gasp, a drop of water ephemeral as midnight dew.

He hit the sand with a dull thud, the impact ringing up his ankles and through his calves, but he stayed on his feet with only a little windmilling. There was no pride in it, no sense of the accomplishment he'd always imagined would come with conquering a childhood fear. Instead he felt emptier, foolish—his breath came back to him and the pain faded and he was left with nothing again, a weak rush that fled too fast.

Thoughts tried to steal back in, in the silence after his breath stilled. Before anything remotely coherent could form, Myde took off again, putting his shoulder behind one of the low roundabout bars and running in the groove around its base as fast as he could, around and around, until the sideways wheel seemed like it would fly right out of his grasp; he leapt onto the roundabout and dropped onto his back between the spokes, bracing himself with feet on two bars and hands around two more. The wheel hurtled around, tilting on its ancient axis, every spot of wear translating into an enormous wobble at what seemed like such high speeds; his stomach tossed at the up-down-sideways motion. Myde lay on his back, his eyes stinging where strands his hair flew into them and filled his vision. The centrifugal force threatened at any second to hurl him off, and his hands strained around the worn bases of the bars.

But then it was over, the roundabout creaking to a crawl, and Myde was left staring at the sky again, overcome by the futility of it all. He was playing—except he wasn't having any fun—in a park he'd never heard of, who knew how far from the home he couldn't imagine himself ever being welcome in again and _what was he going to do?_ Not just ever, but right now? What was he going to do _right now?_

He realized, without warning, that it was cold; the traces of sweat he'd built up running over the playground were ice against his heated skin. He had only a thin sweatshirt he'd thrown on after work and his jeans; his wallet was thankfully tucked in his back pocket, but he'd left his keys at home.

He'd caught his breath, and now the lingering heat left him too. Myde shivered and slumped off the roundabout. All his limbs felt like lead and the bottom of his stomach had fallen away. He couldn't go home, so where was he going to sleep? There was a bench not too far off, but its cold concrete surface didn't look comfortable at all, and he was bound to be noticed and chased off, and oh god, the cops would take him into the station and call his mother and how could he stand it if she refused to come get him, if she told them she didn't want anything to do with him?

Myde looked around nervously, hoping for an answer to a more immediate problem this time. To his surprise, something like a solution did present itself: a giant stone animal (_A turtle?_ he thought), smoothed by years of children crawling over, on, and under it, was plunked down in the sand at the far edge of the playground. Because it was deep in shadow, he had missed it until now, and it sat very low over a deep pit in the sand. He would have a bit of trouble squeezing under its leg, but if he could fit, there looked like plenty of room down beneath, and it would be dark enough to hide him. If he piled up the sand a bit he'd be out of the cold breeze at least…

Myde scrambled beneath the stone playground piece; the hollow under it, dug by years of small hands laboring, was deeper than he'd thought—he'd assumed the sand in the playground went down a few inches, not two or three feet—and he fit comfortably inside on his hands and knees. The deep, shadowed sand was cooler than the rest that had been in the sun all day, but he shoveled a bit of the dry sand down inside and built up little walls in the four gaps between the turtle's pillar-like legs, and in a few moments he noticed it grow a bit warmer than it had been outside.

It wasn't late, nine at the very latest, but safe was better than sorry, probably, and anyway Myde had never felt so much like sleeping in his whole life. If he just slept—maybe forever, if he could just sleep forever—then he wouldn't have to remember, wouldn't have to plan, wouldn't have to do anything and no one would look at him like _that_ again, ever. Or at least he wouldn't have to see it, he wouldn't…

Myde curled in on himself, buried his face in the crook of one arm, and cried very quietly.

He was interrupted after his face was wet and his nose had started to drip miserably by sudden music: _Don't get me wrong, I love you_, a voice sang, _but does that mean I have to meet your father? When you are older you'll understand what I meant when I said, 'No, I don't think life is quite that simple.' _

The personal ringtone Yuffie had set especially for herself. Myde jerked upright as best he could and unzipped his sweater pocket—he hadn't even felt it, but there was his cell phone, going off.

_When you walk away, you don't hear me say, 'Please—'_

Myde rejected the call with one firm press of a finger. He laid back down into the sand and tried to still the last remnants of crying.

The phone was ringing again in an instant, the song begun anew, Yuffie's grinning face popping up on the display. Myde rejected the call again. What was he supposed to say to her? He knew what she was looking for: an explanation he didn't know how to give and didn't want to give and would probably never be ready to give to normal human beings like her. He couldn't answer—he couldn't stand the thought her voice accusing him of… of anything, of being different or being freak or being someone other than her friend. He _couldn't_ answer.

She called twice more before the phone went dead. Myde breathed a quiet sigh. For a long while there was only silence, and leaning into his arm, Myde thought he might almost be able to just sleep. But then the phone went off again, with an entirely different ringtone: that one overly popular Fray song he'd totally loved two months ago but now could barely remember. The ringtone he'd picked for Leon.

Myde hesitated to reject the call—it wasn't that often that Leon called him, and even if he never showed it, he was sure to be ticked about being hung up on… But then, Myde thought, when would he ever see Leon again? If Yuffie had told him (and she must have, for him to call_ now_ of all times), then it was already too late; she'd probably told them all by now...

He rejected the call with fingers that trembled.

Leon didn't call again—he probably hadn't wanted to call in the first place—but Myde held his breath in the break that followed, because he knew that if Yuffie was hell-bent on getting a hold of him she would pull out every stop, and—

_If I fall along the way, pick me up and dust me off. And if I get too tired to make it, be my breath so I can walk_, the phone sang out. _If I need some other love, then give me more than I can stand. And when my smile gets old and faded, wait around, I'll smile again._

The ringtone Yuffie had insisted he pick when she'd forced Cloud Strife's number into his phone.

Myde almost answered. Cloud had never called him before—he couldn't think of a time when Cloud had called anyone. But he knew that all Cloud would do was tell him to call Yuffie because her hysterics were driving them crazy, and maybe Cloud would rather he didn't answer anyway…

Myde let the song play to the end, but Cloud didn't leave a message.

Strains of _In the Rough_ and _I'm Too Sexy_ played one after the other—Tifa and Reno—but Myde rejected these calls quickly, not willing to deal with their complaints on top of the questions Yuffie was sure to have peppered them with.

He was about to turn off the phone entirely when it rang out again.

_Take me, cure me, kill me, bring me home—every way, every day I keep on watching us sleep—relive the old sin of Adam and Eve, of you and me, forgive the adoring beast—_

Another ringtone he never thought he'd need. Vincent Valentine. Yuffie must really be at wit's end if she'd manage to badger him into calling. Myde was pretty sure Vincent didn't even have a cell phone. The cracked screen of Myde's own phone displayed a disinterested pair of red eyes, the surprise photo Yuffie had snapped one day at lunch.

Myde let the phone ring, drifting in the unspeaking red gaze, clear even against the poor quality of the picture. If he had eyes like that, Myde was thinking, who would dare tell him he wasn't right, wasn't good enough?

The song faded away, but Myde jerked when the new mail icon popped up on the screen. Vincent had left a message.

He almost opened it. He'd gone to his inbox without thought.

Myde cancelled, dropped the phone back into his lap. What could Vincent say? There was nothing that would make this any better and even if Myde called him back, everything would go straight to Yuffie, and she'd track him down and she'd make him say things (_I'm not like you_) that he never wanted to say out loud (_I'm not a real person_) and then they really would never want to see him again.

If he didn't answer it might just blow over, right? Yuffie said crazy things all the time. It might just blow over. It might.

And then, after maybe a whole minute of silence, the phone rang again. A generic ringtone, full of beeps and overly cheery rumba beats. He had a ringtone for everyone he knew. He had ringtones for every one of his mother's phones, for their maid's phone, for everyone from school—mostly because Yuffie had insisted—and his phone didn't accept blocked calls so it couldn't be Yuffie hiding her number.

She'd gotten so desperate, she'd given his number to people he didn't even know? She wanted answers so bad she'd dragged some stranger into it? A hot spike of rage stabbed at Myde's throat (not his heart, because he didn't have one of those, did he, _isn't that what you want to hear Yuffie?_) and his hands clenched into fists, going white around the knuckles with the exertion. Before he could even think about it, Myde had jerked his hand back and hurled his cell phone out of the gap under the turtle. It skidded a bit but then settled heavily in the sand, still ringing.

After a long moment it fell silent, and it did not ring again.

Seething and shivering simultaneously, Myde curled up on himself again and started to count grains of sand.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde woke with an angry jolt to the sound of his phone again. But this time it was not a song—the phone was blaring its irritating bell imitation, plainly audible even from where he'd thrown it. His back-up alarm clock. He had two hours to get to work.

Work. A bolt of shock scattered the last vestiges of sleep from his head, and Myde was left adrift. He had completely and utterly forgotten about Rufus Memorial Hospital.

He had to go now, even if he didn't have his scrub and there was sand in his hair and he probably wasn't the most beautiful smelling creature in existence.

Ienzo would know what to do. Ienzo would know.

Myde scrabbled out from beneath the stone turtle, rubbing sand out of his socks and hair and where it was stuck on his face. He plucked his cell phone out of the sand and turned off the alarm with cold-stiffened fingers. The sun had not yet risen; the sky was just beginning to grey with coming dawn, and a fine dew had settled over the park. The soccer fields glinted when he turned his head, every stalk of grass coated in pearls of water. It built into an anxious twinkling in the back of his mind, the universe caught and reflected and reflected in a billion humming beads, molecules buzzing against their bonds.

No time. The park was still unlit, full of shadows, but parks weren't too hard to figure out in general. Myde set off toward the dark building he assumed were the bathrooms.

The water from the sinks was freezing and hard, full of metal and minerals that struck discordant notes when he splashed it, gasping, over his face. Some clarity came back to him; his eyes lost the puffy sting of dissatisfying sleep. Sand sloughed off his cheeks and where it had hidden in his tan hair. He cupped his hands and gulped a mouthful of the water, which tasted a little like chlorine. Myde made a low hum in the back of his throat, and the water swished, scouring across his teeth in a methodic little dance as if pushed by one of those over-powered electric toothbrushes. It wasn't quite as good as toothpaste, but it would have to do.

Feeling a little more presentable (physically—because in his head he was—) and with the sky a little lighter, Myde left the park in search of a bus stop with a route map.

It took him three transfers and nearly all of his two hours to get within sight of Rufus Memorial, but if he was running, it wasn't because he was afraid of being late. The sudden wave of resentment that overcame him took Myde by surprise. Right at this moment, he didn't have any desire to be an intern on top of being a Nobody; he wanted to curl up in Ienzo's room and whine or shout or cry until he knew what he would be doing tomorrow, and the day after, and after that—what he would be doing in a few years if he still had no heart and no mother and all his love of music and magic had turned into bitter hate and dissonance? So what if he didn't get credit for this internship? So what if he never got a degree? The glittering face of the hospital was like a pretty gloss on the lips of a consortium of narrow-minded idiots. How was _that_ for a college education?

No such thing as Nobodies, Yen Sid?

If it didn't mean never seeing Ienzo again, Myde might have quit Rufus Memorial right then, cutting free from just one more place where he couldn't be himself or Demyx or whoever it was that made the water dance.

Instead he entered through the hospital's front doors, chilled as always by the overactive air-conditioning. He was a minute late, but when Belle looked up from her newest book, he knew he wasn't going to get into any trouble for it. Her brow had creased in consternation, and she stared openly, as if the word _misery_ were drifting over his head for anyone to see. It might as well have been: his mouth was caught in a scowl he couldn't force himself out of, and his teeth were clenched so tight it hurt. He could only imagine what his eyes looked like—dark, devoid of any of his usual charm, no will to see any of the things he was seeing…

"My scrub got into some trouble at home—" That didn't make any sense. He couldn't really care. "—sorry. Is there a spare I can use?" Even to his own ears, Myde's voice was a dead thing: sluggish, so far beyond tired that each word rose and fell, all the fatigue of climbing up and climbing down a mountain, determined effort long since given way into the disenchanted crawl for survival. His words crawled in the cold air, barely audible, disconnected from their speaker. Myde felt as if he were leading his own funeral procession: forgetful of everything but the inevitable ending point to which he was drawn and driven.

Belle looked like she desperately wanted to ask what was wrong, but the knowledge that it might hurt him held her back. Instead she directed him deftly to the spare supply closet and watched him until he vanished into the hall; each step he took seemed like an enormous effort, but there was a sense of grim purpose around him, like the mingled horror and relief of disaster survivors. Belle wanted to know more than anything what could shape the intern's normally cheerful face into rigid agony, but even her curiosity knew when to wait.

Myde returned only a few minutes later, the spare scrub a little loose and long, hiding the tension in his shoulders and the stiffness of his step. Without saying another word to her, he disappeared behind the elevator doors. She watched the digital floor indicator change, stopping, as she'd expected, at the third floor.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde slid his key card out of his wallet with hands that trembled—from anticipation or because the poorly constructed dam on his (shadow?) feelings was cracking, he couldn't say. Without ceremony or hesitance, he pushed the door open and slipped into the dim of the violet room.

The air was mausoleum cold and still, like no creature had ever breathed in it, and it caught the morning light and held it prisoner, suspended at odd angles; the dust motes did not swirl or even seem to fall through the yellow sun spots that wormed between the slats of the window shade. Shadows sat in the corner and folded up on the unmade, empty bed like solid objects, permanently placed for effect.

Stepping into the room felt like burying himself alive, so deep in the dark earth that nothing stirred around him, nothing could wake him, down where the ground water might brush and pool under his rigid back, but that seemed about right to Myde—because he almost remembered dying, and it had felt a lot like all of this.

And Ienzo was small in the teal chair: his knees drawn up, his smudged hands wrapped tight around as if they were the only things holding him together, his face buried away. Set and still as if he might never shift again.

Myde knew without moving, without asking, without observation that Ienzo was not asleep. The curl of the other man's spine was furiously stretched, agonizing; his white hospital shirt pressed against his skin so closely that Myde could trace the lines of his shoulder blades and the dips and rises of individual vertebrae.

The intern took first one step into the room and then another. The sound of his shoes against the tile died where it formed—nothing echoed in the room and no sound even lasted. Ienzo did not look up, did not flinch. Even though he trudged, Myde crossed the room in what felt like an instant, as if the space between them had been only an illusion. His eyes low, he watched the top of Ienzo's head—noted, up close, the almost imperceptible way Ienzo was shaking (drawn out tremors like an addict, one after another after another).

"Ienzo…" was all Myde could manage, and even that unsteady whisper seemed to take all his breath. There was a long moment in which neither of them moved, when Myde stood above the teal chair and his only ally and imagined what would happen if he just gave up—if he refused to leave the violet room, forgot the rest of the world existed, reduced his life to the walls too—he didn't need to be happy, he just needed a place he could _be_.

And then Ienzo lifted his head at last and stared up at Myde with eyes fatigue-swollen and ringed by circles so black it looked as if someone had tried to beat his eyes in or pluck them out, as if Ienzo had never slept in his life—as if he had spent half an eternity at the fruitless, unceasing labor of living. If the word _misery_ were drifting over Myde's head, the word _desolation_ had settled on Ienzo's shoulders, in the hollows under his eyes, the split in his dry, worried bottom lip, the desperate furrow on his brow. Myde could believe the world was ending, looking into a face like that.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke; they stared at each other in a way that hurt, with a weight that threatened to crush his bones and all the tender pieces beneath, and then Ienzo unfolded, uncertain and unreal as shapes in a fog.

"Demyx," he said.

His hands fisted at the intern's back, a hopeless, furious grasp. In degrees of hesitant collapse, he buried his face in Myde's borrowed scrub below the steady curve of ribs. Without thought, Myde wrapped an arm around Ienzo's shoulders and lifted his free hand to rest on the back of the other boy's head, a gesture of comfort he wished someone could give to him too.

Ienzo just breathed, so quick and loud it could have been sobbing (but it wasn't really, it wasn't), living off the all-encompassing scent of sand and water and salt tears, that one familiar nothing in this world.

"Demyx."

"I'm here."

A sort of half-silence stole into the room, quieted whatever words Myde meant to add. It was broken only after a millennium of just _being_, leaning against each other because they could not stand alone, taking one deep breath after another to keep from screaming. In a voice so dry and hushed that it cracked, Ienzo said, "I called, but you didn't answer." He lifted his head to stare at Myde with eyes as blue as the deep cores of corpse candle flame.

White-hot guilt lanced through Myde's sternum, lodging in his lungs and coiling up his throat. Yuffie hadn't told strangers about him. That last ring had been Ienzo, Ienzo calling him for help or something like it and Myde had just ignored him, threw the phone out onto the sand and poured all the hatred he wasn't supposed to have into the generic tone while Ienzo sat here somewhere in this dark room looking for a way out, for the one person that didn't deny _everything_, who could understand—and Ienzo sat up all night alone.

Alone. But they were Nobodies and Nobodies weren't built to be alone and he'd laid in the sand all night suffering because he was such an idiot. If he'd just thought for second, if he wasn't so damn self-centered neither one of them would have been—and it was his fault.

Because he knew Ienzo wouldn't snap at him for it today, Myde brushed a sand-worn thumb along the dark line beneath Ienzo's right eye, the one Demyx did not see in memories. His touch was nothing, the ridges of his fingerprint moving along bruised skin so lightly they might not have been touching at all; the thin flesh beneath Ienzo's eye was too smooth, devoid of minute hair or dryness or the invisible blemishes that gave skin texture—the dark circle seemed to cling to the rough pad of his thumb. Ienzo shuddered, the sensation of foreign touch, as always, inexplicably more poignant than the feel of one's own hands.

"I'm sorry," Myde breathed, surrendering to guilt and the world that refused to let him do even one thing right. "I didn't know it was you. They wouldn't leave me alone last night and I—" The words died on his tongue. There weren't enough excuses in the world to make up for what had been lost, even if he couldn't say for certain what was gone. "I'm sorry."

Ienzo did not reply, but he turned his face away at last, blocking out all traces of light with Myde's borrowed scrub. Silence settled in the room again, but it was a little lighter than before. As long as he didn't have to face it all by himself, Myde thought, he could probably survive most things. Surviving—that was important now, that was all he could think about now that everything else that made up living was gone.

"My mom…" Myde began, but choked. He swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat. "My mom and one of my friends… found out."

"Found out?" Ienzo murmured, the words a solid, humming thing where his throat pressed against Myde's stomach. His shoulders had tensed again, confusion or anticipation coursing through him.

"That I'm a Nobody." The declaration came out final and real, the last time he would admit something that was no longer a secret.

"How?" Ienzo managed.

"Last night, my powers came back." He didn't stumble over that idea, what should have been impossible already dulled into the typical. "No," he mumbled, "they were always there. I just didn't remember them until now."

"Remember?" Ienzo jerked back, pushing against the circle of Myde's arms.

"Look." Myde drew back, momentarily surprised by the cold of the room when he had unwound his arms and pulled away from Ienzo's hands. He clapped once, slow and loud, and when he drew his hands apart a clear, trembling ball of water drifted between his curved palms, a inch diameter orbit to the time of a unheard universal hum. Ienzo watched, unmoving, his gaze betraying nothing.

Myde flicked a finger and the ball of water unraveled into a thin thread that danced around his wrists and shoulders, its movements as sharp as their were fluid, like it was being buffeted by currents of air in the room that neither of them could feel.

He whistled, and the ribbon burst into a million shining droplets, mist and rain that hung suspended, a glittering, lazy swirl in the air. Ienzo reached up one smudged hand and brushed a swath of droplets aside, as easily as parting a beaded curtain.

"You just… remembered?" he asked, although the question drifted through the room unattended, like he had forgotten it the moment he'd said it, like he never meant it for Myde in the first place.

"I don't know how," Myde answered anyway, waving a hand to diminish the droplets into invisible water vapor and molecules again. "It just sort of happened."

"It just happened," Ienzo repeated, and for the first time since they had originally looked at each other that morning Myde caught a glimpse of real emotion on Ienzo's face—real and dark and deep, a bitter anger that came with no forewarning. Myde felt as if hot water had been poured over his head, scalded.

"Everything just happens to you," Ienzo said, not looking Myde in the face; he watched the lock on the closed door, unblinking. "Without even trying, you summon the Dancers and use your powers like you never forgot how." Myde watched Ienzo's hands fist in the loose white legs of his pants. "When I've been trying and trying for the slightest…"

"Ienzo…" Myde stumbled for words. The world had a cruel sense of humor. What he never wanted, Ienzo had been desperate for almost all his life. "You… made the portal yesterday."

"Did I?" Ienzo asked, the words barely moving his lips. There was a clinical sound to it all. "You saw me try. I couldn't make a portal on command even when we needed one most. Maybe that first corridor was you all along."

"I don't think—"

Ienzo looked at him at last, a flat, blue, invading gaze that felt as if it turned Myde to stone. "I have all my memories now," he said. "I know what my powers were and how they worked. I _remember_, and still I can't—" His voice broke, his teeth buried in his bottom lip, his face contorted with agony and loathing, though whether Ienzo loathed him or _himself_, Myde couldn't guess. "I'm not whole, but I'm not like you either…"

"What am I, Demyx?" he asked finally, and what the resounding silence said for him was _Answer me, answer me, answer me._

Myde felt the world pecked out from beneath his feet, chipping away infinitely slow into dust the slightest breeze might carry off. Who was he to answer a question like that, when he didn't even know himself, when he couldn't even tell if his name was Myde or Demyx or both? The air in the room was emptying of everything, becoming so light he could hardly breathe it.

"I don't know," Myde said at last, because he had to say something, and any other answer would have been a lie.

Ienzo exhaled every bit of air in his lungs, loud and shuddering, the sort of bracing breath that ended fierce sobbing, though his eyes were dry. He didn't say anything, and Myde was grateful. They could only live through their world crumbling apart so many times before they ran out of ways to carry on.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

It could have been seconds or a hundred years later when scuffling and a muffled, drawling voice in the hall interrupted their low conversation. Myde dismissed the idle thought that the voice was familiar and stared askance at Ienzo—in the weeks he had been working there, the only people who had ever come to Ienzo's room were Tseng and Aerith, and the first only came to drag Ienzo off to the next organized function he didn't want to attend.

Ienzo shrugged dismissively. "Emergency recruits," he muttered, with no small amount of ingrained dislike.

"Emergency recruits?" Myde eyed the door, unable to stop himself from hunching back a little. Whoever was coming in—or trying to, by the sounds of the cursing and the shaking of the doorknob—was an intruder in the dust, someone else who did not understand what they were and were becoming.

"What the hell is with this door, yo?" The aggravated, muffled voice in the hall struck a chord of awareness within Myde, and then the lock flashed green and the door flew inward, a rooster red-head attached to its handle.

"Reno?" Myde blinked. "Rude?" he blinked again, this time vaguely in the direction of Rude, who was more calm in entering the violet room, his ever-present sunglasses blocking out his almost exasperated eyes.

Reno straightened from where he had nearly fallen, brushing invisible dust off the lapel of his security guard jacket. He fixed Myde with a curled-lip, narrow-eyed stare so steely it almost made the intern laugh. Except for the part where it didn't.

Reno knew. Yuffie had told him. Reno _knew_. He could tell anyone he wanted—or worse, he could stare just like he was now, that disgusted look, confusion and hate and all those other things Demyx wasn't supposed to know, and he could say _This is where you belong. Monster. Thief. Evil. What _are_ you?_

"Well, if it ain't the space cadet," Reno drawled, leaning away to look down his nose at Myde. He had to tilt his head back a little to achieve the effect, half hiding his eyes beneath his irrepressible bangs and curves of his cheekbones, a ridiculous expression to anyone watching—or at least to those in the room who were not expecting Reno to bring down the apocalypse of social ostracism upon them. Very briefly, Myde wished he was a turtle. The kind with a very thick shell that was excellent for hiding in.

"Where the hell'd you run off to last night?" Reno continued, the complaint half whine already. "That psycho chick called me _fif_teen times—" he paused to emphasize, counting out and holding up the number on his fingers (a very awkward attempt until Rude offered a helping hand, quite literally), "—and you didn't even answer your phone, yo!"

Myde didn't know what to say. He stared up from where he sat on the edge of Ienzo's bed and made a few hesitant noises that were closer to mouse chirping than coherent human speech. It wasn't that he hadn't expected a tirade, it was just that he'd expected it to start with something more like "Is it true that you're an escaped government experiment?" or whatever else it was that Yuffie told—

"What_ did_ Yuffie tell you?" Myde managed, taken aback by the sudden thought that Yuffie might not have told at all, might just have said he wasn't returning her calls and that he'd gotten into some trouble with his mother, or…

"I listened to that crap fifteen times and I still don't know," Reno groaned. "Something about you being a dancing space alien?"

"A _space alien_?" Myde squawked.

From where he was curled leisurely in the teal chair—returned to his usual intense calm—Ienzo looked between the hospital's new security guards and Myde with a calculating air. When Myde gaped at him, bereft of responses to the claim that they were extraterrestrial beings, Ienzo only quirked an eyebrow.

"They obviously don't subscribe to the One Sky theory," he said, in all seriousness.

Reno seemed to notice Ienzo for the first time. He jerked back in surprise—although Myde knew Reno was sickeningly observant and would have bet good money that surprise was all fake—and looked Ienzo over from head to white-sock-clad toe. When his evaluation seemed to be complete he _tsk_ed out of the side his mouth, pure and purposeful disdain.

"This is the guy we got called here for?" He looked back and forth between Rude and Ienzo, expecting one of the two of them to tell him he'd gotten the wrong room. "If I breathe too hard he'll fall over yo!"

"Reno—" Rude warned, but it was too late.

Ienzo was uncoiling, all the grace and violence of a viper. Myde put a hand out like he meant to stop him, but watching Reno's face tighten and his smile fall, Myde changed his mind and let Ienzo ghost past, long-exposure photography steps.

Myde could almost see Reno tensing limb by limb, readying himself as if Ienzo meant to lunge in for the kill at any second. Ienzo did not stop until he was almost toe to toe with the security guard, looking up just slightly to meet Reno's eyes with a deep lake stare, blue bleeding into abyssal black pupils that seemed to swallow up the air Reno had been breathing.

"Mid-twenties and only just now moving out from under the poverty line," Ienzo mused. "You must be quite proud of yourself."

"H-hey!"

"You're the middle child in a financially inhibited family, and as a result of inobservant upbringing, you are tactless, obnoxious, and remarkably reliable. Outside of slipping away from trouble like wet soap, lock-picking, and the ability to curse in six different languages, you have no particular talents, which led you to pursue a career which requires no particular skill beyond decently quick wit, of which—" and here Ienzo spared Reno an evaluating stare, "—you are in possession. I suppose you're the type to pull yourself up by your bootstraps? Trying to move past the limits of your childhood?"

Ienzo waved a dismissive hand in the narrow space between he and Reno. "You were the one who complained loudest about your public school teachers until your limited group of very patient comrades found out you were a straight A student. Should I go on?"

"Wait…" Myde muttered. "_Reno_'s a straight A student?"

"What the _hell!_" Reno growled, jumping back a step as if he and Ienzo were ring fighters who had just traded serious blows. "I never met you before! How'd you—"

Ienzo smiled then, the barest hint of tooth, and it was as if the shadows beneath his eyes and under the fine shards of his hair and everywhere in the room had begun to coalesce, swirling haze-like at the edges of their eyes and flickering at the upturned corners of Ienzo's mouth.

"To me," he said, breath and decadence, "all you are is an open book."

If Reno had been any less experienced and stubborn, the shudder that slithered down his spine might have been visible to the others in the room. He opened his mouth, hell bent on telling the blue-haired freak off, but Myde seemed to have gotten a hold of himself at last and clambered to his feet.

Myde crossed the room just as Ienzo stepped away from Reno and they ended up shoulder to shoulder, their stares a united front. They shared a momentary private smirk, the kind that positively reeked of in-joke. On the heels of his fading shock, Reno was struck by the sudden and inexplicable sensation that he was the outsider looking in. Even Rude seemed to notice the odd air, because he shifted in his well-polished shoes and looked down at Reno through his glasses questioningly.

"Er," Myde scratched the back of his head and smiled, "this is my… friend, Ienzo. He's a little weird, but you learn to like it." Rude nodded sagely at the same time that Ienzo glared at Myde. Noticing the look, Myde motored on. "And um, these are my friends Reno and Rude. They went to the same college as me."

Ienzo nodded at least semi-politely to Rude, but couldn't resist the urge to "Hmph" when he looked at Reno again.

"Yeah, 'hmph' to you too, you—" Whatever insult he had been about to add was thoughtfully cut off by Rude's smacking a hand over Reno's big mouth.

"We're late," Rude said, his voice low but easily capturing their attention because of the rarity of his speech.

Reno _tsk_ed again, a mild flicker of nerves skittering over his face and disappearing just as quickly. It was their first day after all, and being late with the ward's most important security concern would have to wait until—as he and Rude always managed—they'd grown on their boss like invasive mold and he just couldn't fire them. There'd be plenty of time for tardiness then.

"Let's go, yo," Reno said, in a voice that very much accused Rude, Myde, and Ienzo of holding him back. "Gotta getcha downstairs before all the Frosted Flakes gone."

"Man, I have greeting duty. No Frosted Flakes for me," Myde lamented, as Ienzo stepped around Reno and headed for the door. The moment Ienzo's back was turned, Reno flipped him the bird.

"I saw that," Ienzo deadpanned, not bothering to turn around at all.

"Pfft," Reno nonsense-griped, throwing his hands up and staring pointedly at Rude. The bigger man just shrugged.

Although it would have saved him time to take the elevator one hall over, Myde followed the motley group down the corridor. For every obvious reason and several reasons he couldn't even fully explain, he did_ not_ want to leave Ienzo alone with Reno and Rude. He stood between the two groups, lost as to which side he should try to strike up conversation with.

After they'd entered the elevator, the enclosed silence quickly became too much for Reno to bear, and he set a patently sharp stare on Myde's face, all traces of comedy gone as if they had never been.

"What the hell was Yuffie talkin' about, anyway?" Reno asked, as if that thread of conversation hadn't died a long time ago.

"Ah ha ha…" Myde watched the elevator's floor display with blatant desperation. "You know… it's Yuffie… She probably just had a weird dream!"

Reno's curiosity was clearly not appeased. "So why weren't you at the house when she called?"

"I got in a fight with my mom," Myde said, mostly the truth. He could feel more than see Ienzo listening intently. "About music," Myde finished belatedly, hoping Reno might just accept the usual cause of his arguments with his mother. And it had been about music. Sort of.

Myde squirmed under his friend's interrogative, narrow-eyed stare. "But Yuffie said she saw—" Reno was cut off by the ding of the elevator, and Myde was gone out the doors before they'd even opened fully.

"Gotta run!" he called back, huffing in great relieved breaths at his convenient escape. "See you later!" _And please don't maul each other_, he added to himself as the elevator doors closed behind him.

There were perhaps seven seconds of silence in the elevator before, without any ceremony or warning, Reno tossed out, "Hey, Ian or whatever your name is…"

Rude's sigh went unnoticed in the back corner.

"…I hate you, yo."

"I'd say the feeling's mutual," Ienzo retorted, "but the irony would go over your head."

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde knew he was pushing it, but today of all days he wanted to push—he wanted something to go his way without question, something simple that he could control, that wouldn't shed consequences like ever-widening ripples. He wanted something simple with a clear beginning and a clear end, a neat crescendo, a bridge, a chorus, a willing partner.

"This isn't the _Rigor Mortis_ Reel, yah know," he smiled to the unyielding man on his arm.

"I'm going to feed your fingers through a paper shredder," Ienzo replied, his head close to Myde's, his voice low enough that Tseng, who had joined Ienzo's newest shadows to accompany them all to group therapy, could not hear.

As if Tseng would have heard him anyway, over the coarse-grain sandpaper shriek of the recorded fiddle-banjo music, which bounced its most unwelcome way into the therapy room from the massive speakers they'd dragged in. Myde made an ungainly hop over a mess of extension cords, dragging Ienzo with him in a jerky circle and releasing him to fall back, switching from the balls of his feet to his heels all the while.

"Great, now two hands!" Doctor Pan called from his jaunty perch on the top of the largest stereo. That had to be against some hospital rule somewhere, Myde thought, as he chased his wayward partner all the way across the line of dancers and dragged Ienzo's hands out from behind his back. Then again, this was Doctor Pan, and nobody liked the people who corrected Doctor Pan.

"Come on! It's _fun!_" Myde whined, stumbling when Ienzo dug his heels in and refused to be spun.

"It's ridiculous." The look on Ienzo's face promised Myde a slow, tortuous death as soon as he could shake the security guards.

Myde hauled as hard as he could, until Ienzo had to turn or fall flat on his face. Turning was marginally less humiliating. But only marginally. "Everyone else is doing it," Myde wheedled, releasing Ienzo's hands. "I'm doing it!"

"That's how I know it's ridiculous."

"Now you do-si-do!" Doctor Pan added from somewhere behind them.

Ienzo froze where he stood, resolutely refusing to do-si-do in any direction at all. His grimace was so stark, Myde almost thought he was in real physical pain. _Embarrassment's an emotion too, Ienzo_, he thought with a pout, going through the motions of the do-si-do all by himself.

"Pleaseee," he cajoled, when they faced each other for a spare moment from their respective places in the parallel lines of dancing patients. "Look, even Reno's laughing at you for not trying," Myde added, pointing to the red-head behind Ienzo's back, who was doubled up and leaning on the wall near the door to support himself. It was a low blow, because relations between Ienzo and Myde's long-time college shenanigans partner had only grown worse throughout the day.

"No," Ienzo hissed, refusing to look back, "he's laughing at you, for volunteering to dance with a man."

Myde seemed to consider this for a few moments, tapping his bottom lip with an errant finger in time to the bouncing music. "Nah," he concluded at last, "Reno loves this kinda stuff."

Ienzo quirked an eyebrow, wondering if he was about to learn things he'd rather have not.

"I mean stuff he can gossip about." Myde grinned conspiratorially. "You didn't hear it from me, but Reno and Rude are worse than high school girls when they think nobody's listening."

"And you're fine with him gossiping about _you_?" Ienzo stared.

"Welp," Myde shrugged, "I got kicked out of my house, my best friend thinks I'm a space alien, I don't have a heart, and the only person who _gets it_ is the insane asylum's problem case. Whatever rumor Reno can come up with, my reality can top."

"This isn't an asylum," Ienzo muttered, resentful, "and facetious isn't a tone that suits you."

Just as he'd finished saying it the breather pause ended and Doctor Pan started calling the dance again. The head couple—Selphie and some guy with extraordinarily orange hair—whizzed down the row in giant bounds.

"Dancin's almost as fun as bouncin'!" The boy's voice was nearly as big as he was.

"You said it!" Myde heard Selphie crow in reply, before they'd joined the end of the row and Myde and Ienzo were forced to shuffle upward. This, at least, Ienzo did not resist, although he made no effort to move in any way other than a bored slouch.

"What's got you so worked up about Reno anyway?" Myde asked, so he wouldn't have to admit to not knowing what facetious meant.

Ienzo looked down at the floor. He was so lost in whatever was bothering him that he let Myde drag him around in a neat circle without complaint—without even, really, noticed he'd been moved at all.

"He reminds me of Axel," Ienzo said at last, turning even the air bitter, as if the words made real something Myde could not see or touch.

Axel.

Ienzo had told him about Axel, and he knew what should be coming to mind was heat and treachery and eyes like cheap absinthe, but what came first to Demyx was—was nothing itself, the sensation that something had been lost, punched out of the very air with a clean and sharp cutter in a shape of a man, until what was left behind was the opposite of an outline, an absent silhouette.

What he remembered was—

_ "And even I know it's hopeless. I mean… no matter what the Superior says, Roxas is gone, isn't he?"_

but most of all—

_The dark shape of an empty thing—not even like a human anymore—pressed against the sun that always dying and never dead, in the town that slept and woke to the arbitrary whistling of a ghost train, blacker for the light in which he bathed, the electric blue popsicles in his loose hands melting into brilliant drops that ran between his fingers and on to the clock tower bricks, unfailing tears, perfect dark circles that fell off-time to the afternoon bells ringing on and on._

"Were Axel and I friends?" Myde asked, jerking himself from dreams and struggling to catch up with the dance.

Ienzo let out a short, derisive hum. "You were barely tolerated." Evidently it didn't occur to him that Myde might find slights against Demyx offensive, because Ienzo went on to add, without the slightest hint of sympathy, "None of us were friends with you."

The almost off-hand comment stopped Myde in his tracks again—mostly because no innate need to contradict it arose. Over the month they had known (re-met?) each other (including that first time, the part about them _having hearts_), there'd been times when something inside Myde—the great glass windows, Demyx—_knew_ when Ienzo said something that was not quite right, knew and felt the need to set the record straight, much to Ienzo's displeasure. It mostly happened when Ienzo had talked about Demyx, about the things Demyx had done or not done, or liked or disliked. Surely Myde would know those things better than anyone, and he saw fit to say so.

But this wasn't one of those times. As much as Myde would have liked to tell Ienzo he was wrong, there was nothing at all inside him shouting _I did too have friends!_

"But you said that Xigbar—" he tried.

Ienzo waved a dismissive hand at the same time that they shuffled one place further up the line. "Xigbar treated you—and everyone else except the Superior—like a sated cat might treat a canary: with the thought in mind that if he waits until later to kill it, he might enjoy it more."

Myde gulped, not sure enough in any of his fragmentary memories to disagree. "But he didn't treat the Superior like that?"

"No." Ienzo grimaced, looking beyond Myde and the walls of the hospital into an uncertain past with something almost like hate. "The Superior was whatever he ate before he came to watch the canaries."

Myde was overcome with the feeling that he'd just stepped into a mine field of all the hot, angry political machinations he knew for certain he'd never been involved with and never wanted to be involved. Ienzo often alluded to dimensions of the Organization Demyx had never known about—_what do you mean Saïx was a traitor too?_—but this went beyond, into the world where there had been no Demyx, no Myde, no Zexion even, when what had bound Ienzo and all of the originals together was something other than the blind search for what was lost…

Myde backpedaled out of that vein of conversation as quickly as possible, already privy to enough secrets about who had ruined whose life. "But you were friends with Vexen and Lexaeus, weren't you?"

Ienzo must have caught the tight, wary look on Myde's face, because he followed the subject change with a little scoff. "I was passably fond of Lexaeus, if that's what you'd like to call friendship. I might even have, in some sentimental moment, called him a companion. He didn't interrupt my work," Ienzo said, shrugging with his voice, a dispassion betrayed by the way his brows knit, the minute pressing down of the corners of his mouth, his hands tightening in Myde's. "But it didn't matter." That's not true. "It wasn't real." That's not true. "Beings without hearts can't have friendships. We were just pretending."

"That's not true," Myde said. "Axel and Roxas were friends." Never mind that all he remembered of Roxas was _come back come back come back_, that deep down part of him was sure about this one fact, absolutely sure. "You didn't see. You weren't there."

Ienzo loosed a sharp breath between his teeth. "Axel was poisoned by contact with the Keyblader's heart in Castle Oblivion. It made him desperate and foolish. That's not what I'd call friendship either."

Dimly Myde realized they had reached the head of the line and everyone was now waiting for them to split and drift around to the end. Myde watched Ienzo every step he took. All he got in return was a casual toss of Ienzo's head, flicking strands of hair out of his face.

What Demyx remembered was electric blue in the red and gold light, melting into nothing.

"If you'd been there…" he murmured, "I don't think you'd say that. I don't remember much of anything, but… I know it wasn't just pretending. I know it wasn't fake."

"How do you _know_?" If Ienzo laughed, it wasn't from amusement. "What kind of friends could they have been, with no hearts to feel friendship?"

All Myde asked was "You're my friend now, aren't you?"

There was no answer, but Myde didn't worry, because Ienzo let himself be led in a neat circle in time to the glittering swirl of the universe and the fiddle and all the dark water whispering inside them both, and that was not a "no" at all.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Have you ever heard of the sitar?" Ienzo asked, later, as a passing comment in a moment when no one else was around.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

So then he stood in the doorway of Rufus Memorial Hospital, the sun setting warm on his face and the air conditioning chilling his back, and for a moment he hesitated to step over the threshold. He did not have enough change to even take the buses back to the park he had slept in last night. His moped was in parts at a shop across town, and home was so far out of the picture he didn't even know why it came to mind.

It occurred to Myde, with a brief sting, that in any other situation he'd be walking to Yuffie's now, to eat up all her ice cream bars and crash on her couch even though the couch might have been cut from stone for all the cushion it had left and her father would, without fail, wake him up by lecturing at some god-awful hour of the morning.

It would all have been so much simpler if he could just stay at the hospital, or if he and Ienzo could both just get up and leave, hitchhike to the next town over or fight their way to the next world—but they'd talked about that this morning and it'd come down to the same old story: _We have to consider..._

Considering everything was all good until it landed him here, stuck between a place he couldn't stay and a city with no place for him. The hazy skyline offered no answers; distant car horns promised no welcome. Myde let the hospital's automatic doors close behind him at last, reluctantly stepping out into the parking lot. The afternoon light glinted off windshields, forcing him to squint to see at all.

He couldn't sleep in another park, especially since he didn't know if there even was a park near the hospital. There was a graveyard a couple blocks away, but he _definitely_ wasn't going to sleep there, and the night guard would totally bust him if he tried to crash on any of the benches near RMH. He could find a hotel, but if his mom had put a hold on his card…

Actually, Myde realized with a jolt, that was probably the most important thing. Without money he couldn't eat, and since he was pretty sure that Nobodies couldn't secretly feed on blood or the souls of the damned or whatever else it was that monsters ate nowadays, food was a serious priority. Ienzo had been happy to share his soggy lunch—something about Marlene being off duty—but now that the idea was in Myde's head, he could already feel the beginning grumbles of his stomach.

All right then, that was how he'd keep moving: money first, then food, then sleep. Simple enough, right? He pulled his wallet and his cell phone from his pockets, and fished out his credit card. He'd just call the company, and he'd be all smooth about it too, they'd never suspect he was trying to find out just how much his mother hated him now…

But he never got around to dialing the number on the back of the credit card, because when he turned on his phone, the bright orange new message icon distracted him thoroughly.

"Oh yeah…" Myde said to no one in particular. "Vincent."

Vincent had left a message last night. Myde stared at the phone. Vincent had left a text message. Myde didn't even know Vincent _could _text. Warily, he opened the message, screwing his eyes shut and bracing himself for just about anything. Who knew what Vincent Valentine would have to say about something like this?

At last, when it started to border on silly, he forced one eye open and read the message.

_If you need to_ was all it said, and beneath that, unmistakably, was Vincent Valentine's street address.

A rush of warm gratitude overcame him, so strong he wavered where he stood. Vincent was a godsend and at that particular moment, Myde didn't even care if he was peppered with odd stares all night. So long as he could filch some ramen and wasn't out in the cold, he'd be the happiest runaway the city ever saw. And, most importantly, Vincent's house was far but not impossible to reach on foot. He even knew how to get there, theoretically. Yuffie had pointed out a cross street once at least.

With a single firm nod and just one backward glance, up toward the window of the violet room (even if Ienzo wouldn't be there, stuck on cleaning duty thanks to half the hospital staff _totally knowing_ they'd caused that riot), Myde set off into the city, more sure of where he was going for the moment than he was of so much else in his life.

Although he had to double back twice and then walked past the place a good four times before he realized the address numbers had just faded off, Myde finally reached Vincent's house. It was… no, quaint wasn't quite the word. It was suburban, in a way that his own house in the gated community could only pretend to be. Although there wasn't any white picket fence, the lawn was neatly trimmed and uniformly green, and clumps of _Better Homes and Gardens_ worthy bearded irises softened the edges of the otherwise squat, tiny house. The roof was oddly flat, all the ingenuity of the 1950s, and where he might have expected solid black walls for someone like Vincent Valentine, the house was a plain white, with clean, pale blue trim. The overall effect was one of inexplicable charm, the least alarming or strange house Myde had ever seen. If he hadn't known it belonged to Vincent Valentine, he would have guessed the occupant to be some loving old lady who baked sugar cookies and volunteered at the homeless shelter. Or something.

Although he was sure this was Vincent's house, Myde still hesitated, creeping on to the porch with steps as silent as he could make them. He reached for the bell but couldn't bring himself to ring it immediately. A tiny golden plaque above the bell was etched with the name _Grimoire Valentine_. _Vincent's dad?_ Myde thought. He'd never heard anything about Vincent having parents; Myde had always just sort of imagined Vincent exempt from those kinds of things.

Gathering his courage (although for what, exactly, he wasn't quite sure), he pushed on the doorbell. It made a faint buzzing sound on the other side of the door, and then Myde was left to wait. And wait. And wait. Maybe Vincent wasn't home? It wasn't like his offer necessarily extended to today anyway, and he probably had things to do and—just when Myde was contemplating pressing the doorbell again versus seeming as desperate as he felt, the door swept open, and Myde was left staring up at an utterly unsurprised Vincent Valentine.

"Uh… hi." Myde cringed, an awkward smile working its way onto his face without permission.

"Come in," Vincent murmured, disappearing behind the door. Myde crept after, nursing the door closed behind himself to prevent any irritating creaks.

His eyes needed a long moment to adjust; all the blinds were lowered and none of the lights were on, giving what little sunlight that slithered into the house a diffused, old feeling, like watered-down honey left to sit. At first he could make out only the largest of shapes, but after squinting into the gloom, details began to emerge: a doorway to a kitchen on the left, a dining table off a ways on the right, the living room in front of him separated by a wall with a cut out so large the wall might as well not have existed. On the lip of the cut out, a collection of colored glass vases were arranged with particular care. Each one was coated with a fine, even layer of dust.

The table had a similarly untouched appearance—a silver filigree candelabra sat on the glass tabletop, all three of its taper candles faded from deep to pale red by long years. Two of them had been lit once, and the wick of the third was black at the tip, as if someone had started to light it and was called away before it could catch, never returning to finish what they had begun.

What he could see of the kitchen and the living room was like that too: that old and permanent air that bespoke long years of residency and little use. The refrigerator was probably the first one they'd ever bought—it was rounded and squat like the house, with long silver pull handles. The couch in the living room couldn't have come from any earlier than the 70s; it was all angles, with perfectly square cushions and perfectly square pillows, made from what looked like brown and gold tweed.

By the time he could see the detail on the wallpaper, odd little gold flowers in straight lines, Myde firmly believed he'd stepped off the street and into the Twilight Zone, that one episode where time ceased forever for everyone except…

He couldn't remember—had blocked it out maybe—but this place gave him the same feeling; there wasn't a clock in sight but Myde thought if there was one it would be stopped, stopped like the whole house was, the pendulum of a grandfather clock shuddered to a stand still, waiting and waiting to be wound up and swing to life again.

If time hadn't stopped in the bizarre world of the Valentine house, then it had gone on without them, passing by the shuttered windows in great leaps, knocking at the door, never welcomed. In some distant, detached corner of his head, Myde wondered if he might not turn a corner and run into the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Valentine, propped up in their Sunday best, fading out and clinging on like the whole house was.

And he wondered, too, how Vincent lived in a place like this, how he went through every day without disturbing anything. Myde already felt like he was intruding, even his ragged old jeans too modern. How did Vincent—and why, _why_ did Vincent keep the whole thing poised on the edge of antique and detritus?

It had—and Myde shivered—a cloistered, sacred air, as if the house had been left untouched from the moment its owners passed away, to honor or to appease their unseen souls. The fine hairs on the back of his neck all stood on end, as if he could feel them now, the shades that occupied the house, that went through the motions on the other side of the mirror again, and again, and again, always forgetting to light the third candle.

Except it didn't make sense. If Vincent's parents had been old enough to buy a house like this, all the decades ago when it was built, they would have been too old to be Vincent's parents at all—or Vincent would have to be way older than he claimed to be, and there was no way somebody with Vincent's looks was in his fifties…

So maybe Myde's first idea—that one about the little old lady homeless shelter volunteer—was the right one, and Vincent had just… eaten her or something, and made himself a nest in the empty house. It was a token of how completely disturbing the place was that Myde almost preferred this second guess. At least_ it_ sort of made sense.

With a jolt, Myde realized Vincent had stopped in the hall and was staring expectantly at him, waiting through Myde's open gaping. It was somewhat comforting to see that Vincent too seemed out of place in the house; he must have been napping when Myde knocked, because he had a ratty red blanket draped over his shoulders like a cloak, and the loose black shirt and sweatpants he was wearing had that warm and comfy slept-in look about them.

"Sorry," Myde stuttered, and hurried to catch up. He followed Vincent down the dim, narrow hall, almost bumping into his back when the other stopped abruptly and opened a low doorway that Myde hadn't even noticed. With the barest of glances, Vincent vanished through the door, which (now that Myde looked) opened onto an old and warped set of stairs, leading down into an impenetrable black abyss.

_It's the nest!_ Myde couldn't help giggling—half from genuine nerves and half from his own dumb joke. Vincent turned his head just the barest amount to look back at him, asking without a word just what it was that Myde found so amusing.

"Ah, nothing," Myde was quick to reassure. "I just remembered something funny."

Whether or not Vincent believed this, Myde would never know. He turned without a word, red blanket swishing, and continued his descent into the dark. With far less confidence, Myde followed, watching where he placed each foot and holding tightly to the unfinished stair rail. The air grew cooler the farther down he went, but it kept its humid, crypt-like weight and all its muffling power.

"Um, Vincent…" Myde thought to ask suddenly, "what are we doing down here?" But by that time, Vincent had reached the foot of the stairs and flipped a light switch, and Myde realized without explanation what they were doing.

The full basement—because that's what it was—was tidily furnished, with maroon high pile carpet that somehow saved the grey walls from oppressive monotony. The furniture was all new, or it wasn't vintage, at least. In the room they had entered, Vincent had a completely normal television set, a completely normal coffee table, and a completely normal couch. Some completely normal lamps too. Like upstairs, Myde could see a sliver of kitchen if he leaned the right way, and in the kitchen, the toaster at least had a very modern air.

This was obviously where Vincent actually lived. _The nest is…nice_, Myde decided, although he couldn't understand the sentiment that forced Vincent to remain in the basement when it was pretty obvious that the rest of the house was empty.

Vincent did not wait for him to finish gawking this time, and instead disappeared, in a bright red swirl, to one of the other rooms. After the half moment's hesitation it took Myde to realize Vincent had probably never invited anyone in and would have found traditional hospitality a waste of words even if he had, he continued down the stairs and followed after Vincent.

The walls in the hallway were bare, devoid of any personalization, but when Myde peeked around the door into the room that Vincent had entered, he was surprised by a sudden change. The red carpet was the same, but the walls were covered with giant panels of corkboard, which were in turned covered by sheets and sheets of paper, pages of neat, even handwriting and sketches of creatures Myde could never have imagined even in his nightmares. _The Galian Beast_, the nearest said, and Myde had to turn away from the sketch monster's gaping jaws, remembering how that particular fictional creature had used them to tear apart more than one innocent bystander in Vincent's novel.

He tried too hard not to look at the sheets of words either—partially from fear of reading something spooky, but mostly because they reminded him of Ienzo and more solid words on the wall, real things and real monster stories.

There weren't any lights on in the room, but a long, narrow window near the ceiling let in the afternoon light, tinting everything gold. Vincent sat at a computer desk along the far wall, although where a computer normally would have been, there was instead an old blue and black typewriter, a half-finished page still resting on the platen.

From behind a fold of the old red blanket, Vincent fixed Myde with a stare that was at once curious and disengaged, serious and fond.

"What is it now?" Vincent said, his first words since the front porch. The voice didn't take Myde by surprise—somehow, Vincent had a way of making every word he spoke part of a bigger conversation, as if they'd been saying things to each other since he'd opened the door, and only now dropped the small talk and hit upon the primary issue.

_And seesh, what an issue_. Myde felt like he was in for the long haul even though he knew Vincent wouldn't press him if he didn't want to talk. He sat down heavily on the foot of Vincent's bed, the only place to sit in the room besides the occupied desk chair.

For a long while, Myde stared somewhere over Vincent's shoulder, not seeing anything, his eyes going dry. At last, with a half shrug, Vincent said, "Yuffie was upset," as if it was passing fact, not an encouragement to speak if he ever meant to.

But Myde knew what it was, and he flinched. "Yeah," he murmured. "She uh… she…" And god, what has he supposed to say to Vincent? He knew he would have to give some explanation, but if even Reno was reluctant to believe that Yuffie was just exaggerating, there was no way Vincent was going to believe it…

He looked at his friend—really looked—for the first time that day, evaluating, discovering the tired lines beneath red eyes, the restrained cant of the other's expression, the resolve that kept all his family's old things, that accepted change was necessary for the living but disdained it anyway—and Myde thought if there was ever a person who could take a secret to the grave, it would be Vincent Valentine.

He sighed, a loud and heavy gesture, and then, so quietly that anyone but Vincent Valentine might have missed it, Myde said, "Lately… I've been changing and changing… Sometimes, I get the feeling I don't even know myself—who I am, what I am. Soon … nothing will be the same as it was before."

He looked down at his hand, splayed on the green and black flannel sheet. "Yuffie saw a part of the change that I wasn't ready to share with anyone yet. And even if she never says so… it had to have scared her a little bit."

Vincent looked at him still, in that way that accepted everything he said and did not ask for or reject the offer of more. Myde wasn't sure how much farther he could go without just spilling it all, every last thing, and what would Vincent have to say about _that_?

And then Myde wondered if Vincent would have anything to say about it. Vincent was preoccupied with monsters, so preoccupied with his own concerns—about Lucrecia, and himself, and so many other things—that he probably didn't have the time or will to judge the turns of anyone else's life. And it occurred to Myde, then, that if he had to tell it all to any of them, any of the human beings who were his friends, about the mad sort of nonexistence he lived now, there wasn't a better choice in the world than Vincent Valentine. Maybe he even wanted to tell, wanted at least one human being who wouldn't rat him out to know him for what he was, to know that there was so much more beyond the little corner of the universe this city took up…

But even wanting to tell couldn't make it easy. He stumbled a bit, on the edge of uncertain, trying to scale the massive walls of _don't don't don't_ that surrounded the whole thing, and after a long moment of struggle, he knew he would have to give up. He couldn't bring himself to give the explanations, to admit that he was something from Vincent's work, the kind of creature heroes were destined to destroy. Vincent liked fictional monsters, not real ones.

Myde took a deep breath. And then another. Vincent quirked an eyebrow, patient but not impractical.

"It's like… I'm a little kid, learning all the rules over again," Myde murmured. "What's real, and what's not… What I can do, and what I can't… That whole teenage thing about finding yourself—it turns out the person I found wasn't the right one, and now I've got to start looking all over again.

"This probably doesn't make any sense to you, so you don't really have to listen, but… I just don't know anymore. Everything I took for granted could be a dream. Loving my mom. Hating my dad. Wanting to be somebody." He laughed. "No, that last part's probably real." The hand that he wasn't using to prop himself up clenched into a fist over his knee. "It's like I was born with amnesia, and this whole time I was waiting for memories I didn't know I lost."

He wasn't looking at Vincent really, wasn't sure if he could handle a blank stare—or worse, a knowing one. He watched the wall instead, admiring the way the last traces of sunlight filtered through the papers pinned there, blurring their dark contents into something softer, more transparent.

"I don't mean this in a crazy way, like… there aren't any voices or anything, but… inside of me, there's another person. Except… except it's all a mess, because this person used to be me, and I used to be this person, and really, there might not be anyone at all, because I might have been him all along. I might be him right now. That doesn't make sense, sorry."

Vincent made a noise of agreement, although whether he meant he didn't understand, or whether he meant Myde should go on, there wasn't any way of telling.

"It's a big deal, knowing who you are." Myde tried for a smile, but it fell so far short of his normal grin that he killed it quickly, sent it slithering back to the miasma of feelings not every version of him was supposed to have. "But I'm starting to think it doesn't matter all that much for me. I get the feeling that I'm disappearing."

He could feel Vincent watching him, and he wondering if the other man thought he really was crazy, was sitting here talking nonsense—or maybe Vincent was irritated that he had to listen to it all, couldn't just get up and leave for the sake whatever odd friendship it was they had.

_ It was just pretend._

_ No, it isn't. _

Myde watched his own knees, surprised by how he honestly expected to see through them, how he thought it might be happening literally, _Myde_ just vanishing into thin air, swallowed up in Demyx and Nobodies and a universe where all hearts were connected—or lonely hunters, hungry for others.

"But it's okay… I think," Myde stumbled, realizing it was true only after he said it. "As long as I have memories of _this_, how I feel right now, the people that I care about… it won't really matter what I call myself, right? This life won't just go away, even if I change. So I'm starting to think it's okay if I disappear. Or if I'm more than just Myde at the end."

"If you're the other person too?" Vincent's sudden question startled Myde, ripped him out of the place he'd slipped into in the back of his head, where everything had faded out except the sound of his own voice. He hadn't even expected Vincent to listen, let alone to try and follow.

"Yeah, him too. Together, like we're supposed to be." He managed a real smile then. Looking up at Vincent in the darkening room, Myde met a red stare with growing confidence, reassured though Vincent had not said a word. It was nice, he thought, just talking without anticipating a reply, without needing to explain _why_ he was thinking this way or that…

"Can you do me a favor though?" he thought to ask then, rising to stand as if overcome by restless energy or the solemnity of a request he would ever make once.

"If I do disappear, take care of Yuffie for me, okay?"

In the room, shards of daylight settled on the red floor, dying the carpet gold and ginger and pink, giving way slowly into night.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde was awoken by a loud noise almost immediately—or maybe it was several hours later; he had no conception of time as he swam groggily out of his odd dreams, and his phone was all the way over there on the coffee table...

The noise sounded again, a muffled but echoing _thump-thump_ that filtered down from somewhere above him. It took another few repetitions before he realized the noise was someone banging on the front door of the house upstairs… someone who wanted in pretty badly, if they were knocking at—he fished for his phone on the table and flipped it open—at four a.m. in the morning?

Some innate, cowardly sense set his skin to prickling. Normal people didn't beat on doors at four a.m. in the morning.

"Vincent?" he whisper-called, even though whoever wanted in was definitely far enough away to not hear him. "Vincent?"

There wasn't any answer. Myde struggled off the couch and padded toward Vincent's room. He knocked on the door after a moment's hesitation, and when there wasn't any reply to that either, he eased the door open and peeked in.

The desk lamp was off, and even in the near pitch black, Myde could tell that Vincent wasn't in his room. But then, outside the long, narrow window, a shadow in the shape of a man walked by. The shadow was wearing boots that didn't look like they belonged to Vincent Valentine.

All of Myde's skin was prickling now; his heart crawled up his throat and beat like a bass drum. Someone was sneaking around outside.

"Vincent?" he called again, quieter and more urgent. He ducked back into the hall and checked the other rooms—storage, the kitchen, and a bathroom. They were all dark and quiet.

Someone was outside, and Vincent was gone.

Myde gulped. "What do I do?" The banging on the door upstairs hadn't stopped. _It's ax-murderers! It's crazy ax-murderers and they got Vincent and now they want me too!_

Except ax-murderers usually didn't need to knock on the front door, did they?

"_What_ is going _on?_" Myde whimpered. Maybe Vincent was upstairs, barricading the door? But there weren't any furniture scraping sounds. Not even footsteps. Myde would have to face whatever was out to get him alone.

Myde gathered up whatever little specks of courage he had. First, the thing at the door. He could peek out one of the front windows and see who was on the porch; if there was any sign of an ax, he could just… call the police and _hide_. Demyx had been pretty good at that hiding thing.

With several deep breaths, Myde forced himself up the staircase. At night, the untouched things upstairs that had been eerie by day became shapes from every nightmare he'd ever had—every shadow waiting to leap out and dig its claws into him, every bulky piece of furniture hiding half-rotten zombies, preparing to pounce on him en masse and eat his delicious college-educated brains.

Each footstep was as slow and quiet as he could get it as Myde crept over to the window behind the dining room table. With more daring than he ever thought possible, he flipped up one slat on the blinds and made himself peer out into dark. By tilting his head just the right way, Myde could see the small front porch. There were two people standing there, just bulky shapes in the night. They didn't look like they were carrying axes…

"Blinds moved," one of them said to the other, pointing to where Myde was standing.

_Shoot, shoot, shoot! _Myde dove toward the floor, cowering under the windowsill and praying they hadn't seen him.

"Hey, is anybody in there?" the other person on the porch called out. "We're with the Dawn City Police Department."

The police department? Oh god, what if something had happened to Vincent, and they were here looking for his family members? What if he got kidnapped or beat up by gangsters? What if the twenty-four-hour ice cream parlour mixed up their chopped walnuts and peanuts, and Vincent was at Rufus Memorial in anaphylactic shock?

Myde raced around the dining room table to the front door. It was half way open before he realized he had just made a huge, huge mistake.

The two police officers on the porch stared at him for what felt like an eternity. The first officer looked down at the notepad in his hand, and then back up.

"Are you Myde Cistern?" he said.

_Oh crap._

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ģσłđεη – Ĥąммεŗ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

1) Since I last updated, there has been a huge and amazing influx of fanart for this story, all of which absolutely blows my mind and deserves more praise than a single human being is capable of producing. There is a link to a gallery of the works in my profile—check it out and be awed like I am! Thanks so much to **Hanyou-cat**, **Amethyst98**, **A1y55**, **Maggie10**, **Zenelly-raen**, **Nutbrain**, and **Plasmodesmata** and **Apertureboo**. I adore you all!

2) **Trivia:** "Oh how the mighty have fallen in the midst of battle" is a line from the _King James Bible_, 2 Samuel 1:25. _**In this chapter:**_ Title drop like whoa. Can you spot the titles of the works published by Eugene O'Neill (in 1956), William Faulkner (in 1948), and Carson McCullers (in 1940)? Also, bonus points for people who can name all the ring tones. *lame*

**Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alerts list!**


	9. Silver Bullet

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar  
_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħą__ρ__τ__ε__ŕ III_

Vąłžεŗ – Đεłłε – Ǿŗε – ( Äłłεġŗσ ) :

Şίłνεŗ – Вūłłεŧ

This chapter is dedicated to Queenserena and NaokoYouko.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_This point is important for what follows,  
the problem of writing being closely linked to the problem of "knowing by heart." _

- Derrida

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde's hand tightened on the door knob.

The shorter of the two police officers looked down at his notepad and then back up. "Are you Myde Cistern?" he repeated, mostly to fill the silent air.

Myde retreated, putting the edge of the door between himself and the early morning, the cold, and the curious, dangerous faces. "What… What'll happen if say yes?" he mumbled.

What really happened to superheroes who lost their secret identities? (What happened to _villains_?) Was there a place to take people like him—people who could do things they weren't supposed to? And what if someone somewhere along the way had believed Yuffie's space alien story and now they were coming to collect him, bag and tag and autopsy him?

A low buzzing, like insects, started to gather in Myde's ears, and he thought for a moment it was internal noise: the sound of synapses firing, precursor to a nervous breakdown. But the police officers noticed it too, and turned to look back toward the street. Myde realized suddenly that the static humming sound was dew on Vincent's front lawn quivering, vexed into movement by his own agitation.

The police officers shared a cautionary and suspicious glance, and both of them moved their hands to their holsters as if the buzzing were something they would have to shoot out of hiding. _Like they could shoot water down anyway_, Myde huffed, coming to a series of quick realizations.

Being afraid now was stupid, wasn't it? These were police officers, not Keyblade Masters. No one could make him go where he didn't want to go—not when he could do things like drown people in the middle of a desert.

"I am Myde Cistern," he said. Sometimes. For the moment.

The second police officer's rigid posture collapsed into a put-upon slouch. "_Thank_ you." He raised slender arms up in mock worship and rolled his eyes heavenward. It was four in the morning. Myde thought he understood the lack of professionalism.

"Are you going to arrest me?"

"Yup. Hands up. Your reign of terror is over. We caught you fair and square. This town ain't—"

"He's joking," the first police officer said, stepping down hard on his partner's toes. "We're strictly retrieval tonight."

_Retrieval?_ That didn't sound any better than arrest. Who exactly wanted Myde retrieved?

The first police officer was still talking. "I know you've probably got your reasons and you're legally an adult," he said, "but it might be best, if you feel safe, to go home and talk out whatever problem made you leave."

"It'd definitely be best for us," the second said around a dry laugh.

"Go home?" Myde couldn't help but repeat rather stupidly.

The impolite officer grimaced. "Your mother hasn't given our missing person's line a ten minute break since yesterday night. Normally we'd wait a while to set up a manhunt for a _twenty-year-old_ who got in a fight with his old lady, but the fifth time she threatened us with all her journalist buddies was enough for me. If we hadn't gotten a call from your little friend, we'd still be playing hide-and-seek—"

"My mom…" Myde interrupted. He stared straight ahead, through the police officers and out across the street, to the young eucalyptus trees staked on the narrow strips of lawn in front of each manicured house. In the dark, the orange street lights washed the road with a strange glow that threw the smallest of shadows into relief. "My mom isn't mad?" Myde asked the street, his hand falling from the door knob.

The second officer smirked again. "Oh no, she's mad all right. If what I got on the phone was a tenth of it, you're in for an earful when you get home."

_Home. _A thrill of energy ran down Myde's spine, so complete he thought he could feel every nerve individually sparking. He'd misunderstood somewhere; his mother didn't hate him. She'd been looking for him. He could go _home_.

A grin stole over his face and kept growing without even asking for his permission. Myde looked at the officers—really looked—for the first time, and found them more curious than intimidating, two tired people trying to do what was right. They had no idea—no idea at all—what mess they'd stumbled into, and no one was ever going to tell them. They'd go home after this night and wake up to a new case tomorrow, a real missing person (a real person really missing). They'd drink coffee, do paperwork…

"Can we go right now?" Myde asked, still grinning. "To my house?"

"Finally," the second policeman muttered, at the same time the other said, "I think your mother would appreciate that."

Myde spun around and took off without a word, back into the suspended dust and darkness of Vincent's house.

"Hey—"

"Getting my wallet!" he shouted back over his shoulder to the owlish blinking of the officers.

In the dark, the dust-black remnants of some other family's life which had frightened him, which had changed shape in the night—the unlit candle, the dull glass bottles—changed again into something sweeter, into memories of his own house, of his mother's favorite candle company; of blue glass china service for eight: the way she made him unpack two plates, two glasses, two platters, two glass-handled forks; the way she had held them up to the halogen kitchen light so he could see through them, see the dust reflecting light impossibly like a hundred flakes of star drifting in a deep ocean—

He kept thinking that word (_ocean ocean ocean_) as he sank back down the hidden stairs in Vincent Valentine's house, into the black depth of that underground life. He did not remember what that word meant, but what it meant to him...

Myde stuffed the cell phone he'd dropped off Vincent's coffee table back into his pocket. _The long, dark sea_, he thought, a piece of memory echoing up from a place he couldn't name. He tried to straighten his unkempt hair in the shadowy mirror of Vincent's television screen (cut it, he needed to cut it; there was too much on the sides) and then, with a last, slow look around the empty basement apartment, he lifted himself from the carpet and ascended the stairs, the weight of his wallet and phone breaking like a constant tide against his leg.

_ Home. Home. Home._

The streetlight filtered into Vincent's parents' house, diffusing over the wallpaper and the dated furniture and the door frame. Myde thought about leaving a note, wondered why Vincent had bothered to leave… Well, he could call Vincent later. Now his mother was waiting and his own bed was waiting and—

Myde stepped over the threshold, joining the two police officers on the crowded front porch. He made sure to shut the door behind himself. The night was cool against the backs of his arms, making silent promises of early autumn. In the sky, the moon swam uncertain, enormous, yellow. Myde felt as if it was sinking slowly toward him, but that if it reached him he would discover it was dust and illusion and nothing more.

His mother did not hate him. The infinite number of worlds in the sky kept turning.

Myde breathed in deeply enough that the cold air burned on his teeth. He nodded finally and fully to the police officers, and headed toward their car. On the grass the dew continued to shiver, animated now by the contentment which glowed inside his chest, where his heart was.

He reached the police car and had to wait for the policemen to join him, the thin, exasperated officer jolting a key into the passenger side lock. Before he could open the door, something stirred in the half-light beside the car, and Myde looked up to meet red, red eyes in the dark.

Vincent Valentine leaned against the trunk of the police car as if he had been there all along, as if he belonged there as easily as he belonged every other place in the world, and although he did not smile, there was something genuine and _knowing_ in his stare.

Myde felt like he was lost in a long, long dream. "My mother doesn't hate me," he whispered.

"You don't have to disappear," Vincent said, low and certain.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The wide strip of violet wall within his reach was bare. Ienzo was restless; he wanted to write, but like never before the words which slipped from the marker did not please him, did not sound right, did not mean enough or have the patently factual basis which lent him supreme confidence—

_What_, he wrote, and then struck it through. Questions were not theories.

Watching his fingers streaked with wasted ink and wet letters, he wrote, _Nor seek, for this is also sooth_— His hand shook. He lifted the marker off the wall again as if a pause would make the future more legible.

He had assumed he would never meet another member of the Organization—for all the millions of worlds, only thirteen of them—

He had been wrong.

He had accepted, as fact, the concept that they could not feel because they did not have—

_We do too have hearts_, Demyx said. Or Myde said? Or…

His left hand fisted in his hair, pressed and pulling at his scalp. Pain like the fall of a massive hammer pounded behind his right eye.

"It's not possible," he said to the darkness of the violet room. But what he wrote was _What if?_

This wasn't the story anymore; this wasn't a retelling of what he—what they: he and Zexion and _Ienzo_, the real Ienzo, the eleven-year-old who had _existed_—had lived through. This was conjecture, except that now that the story was finished, he had nothing but conjecture to live in, breath in, committing it to the violet paint because speculation was his world now, like walls which caged (sheltered) his impossibly plural self-definition.

From the beginning, he had been writing. He had written the facts as he knew them, a detailed and analyzed history of the human boy _Ienzo_ who betrayed his master, lost his heart, and crumbled into the conscious nonexistence of the Nobody Zexion. And he had written that story too, the child's body growing to fit the dark procession of Zexion's mind, shoulders and limbs filling out with that nauseating deceit of life, a bigger body but less in it than the boy _Ienzo_ had ever had… And the illusions, and the betrayal, and the castles, and dying.

Ienzo had written what he remembered. But what if none of it had been _his_ story to tell? What if—despite their maddening likeness—he was not _Ienzo_, he was not Zexion, he was not a human _or_ a Nobody? What if he was a shadow, a meaningless receptacle for memories of the damned, forced into a body with blue steel hair and thin joints because the universe—or reality or the gods or whatever else it was that he _didn't_ _understand_—had simply needed a place to store the events of the past?

Or what if he was not even that? What if he was nothing but an unplanned remnant, the thing left behind, left over in the dark space between the human heart and the monstrous Nobody form? There were Heartless in this World who looked and talked like men. And there were other things as well. If the portal he and Myde had traveled through _had _been summoned by him, that meant nothing; Nobodies were not the only creatures to travel the Corridors of Darkness…

And maybe, though all those thoughts made him tremble already, made his stomach turn, made every muscle in his body strain and scream, maybe all of those ideas were wishful thinking.

What if he was a patient at Rufus Memorial Hospital because he truly was delusional? What if he had been a troubled human child who one day simply broke from reality, dreamed a triplicate existence—imagined himself another set of parents, imagined himself a radiant city, a great and terrible adventure? He might have imagined even a tainted adulthood, fantastic powers and allies, enemies and events befitting a master game of chess. Because of this dream, had he clung to the insane belief that his heart had been torn from his body? That he had gone through whole lives and that heart had decided to just never return?

What if there had never been an Ansem the Wise? What if there were no Heartless, no Nobodies? What if there had never been a previous Ienzo, let alone a Zexion, a Demyx? What if there was no Myde here in this city now, just the desperate creation of a piecemeal, lonely mind?

What if he _did_ have a heart?

And what if he was dreaming, even now?

Ienzo did not know when he had fallen backward, but he laid on the cool tile floor with the ceiling above him and the last words on the violet wall glittering dark in the corner of his eye. What if they were an illusion too, each word in the make-believe story a new dream, a new…

_There is no truth_.

Ienzo forced himself to breathe, every inhale and exhale the rise and fall of an immense pressure on his chest. Outside, the parking lot lights hummed the same exact hum he had heard for the last ten years, the same hum he could hear even with psychiatrists and security guards cajoling and cautioning overhead. The stars wheeled where he could not see them. And he shuddered, every synapse in his brain, every cluster along his spine, in the tips of his fingers...

_What are you so afraid of?_ the voice in the dream had called out.

What if he was dreaming, even now?

"Nothing," he answered to no one. And to himself, if there was such a person, he answered, _Not knowing_.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The policemen were bickering on the other side of the metal caging that separated Myde from the rest of the car. Rather, the rail-thin officer in the passenger's seat was single-handedly bickering, talking with sweeping gestures of his hands that would have knocked Myde's front teeth out without the grating in between them. In the driver's seat, the other officer was rolling his eyes, leaning away from his partner with a sort of exasperated but fond familiarity. Myde took all of this in with half his mind. It was a sort of lulling background noise and motion, as insignificant as the neighborhoods through which they were driving, vaguely recognizable but no distraction from the thoughts rushing in his head.

The police car pulled to a smooth stop outside the gates of Aurora Heights, and Myde's heart began to beat in double time, from fear or excitement or some adrenalin-fueled mix of both; he couldn't tell. The gates opened to admit them and then swung closed behind, and as Myde watched the cookie cutter houses glide by in the first of the early morning gray, all he could think of was the glittering crystal of his own porch light, his alarm clock, the scuffed place where he threw his shoes in the hall… Then, above all of that, his mother: the way she had watched him all his life, assuring and being assured, making the best decisions, convincing him absolutely of her affection…

The first officer was opening the side door before Myde realized they had stopped, and when Myde slid out of the back seat it was like crossing back into the soft-edged dream, another of those black and white films, everything marked by some pale, internal glow. The porch light was a far-away candle, blurred and warm. His mother's silhouette, appearing in their doorway, was a singular sonata, the pure drawn out notes of a lone piano beneath the hands of a master—

"My'," his mother breathed, and how he heard her, he didn't know, but then he was in her arms, familiar and safe and judged welcome. The brush of her fingernails against his shoulder was the same as all the years before, as was her cheek against his throat, which was already wet with his tears.

"M-Mom." He stumbled to say what he had thought he might never say again. "I'm sorry I left."

"No," she said into his collar. "No."

He didn't really know what that meant, but the word sounded like the clear reverberations of glissando in a silver flute, sweetness and relief, and so he took it to mean _You're forgiven_, or maybe _You never needed to be forgiven_; if it meant something else, he would never ask, for fear of knowing.

The two police officers had come half way up the front walk, and they lingered there now, varying degrees of chagrin and pleasure coloring the glance they spared each other. The thin officer crossed his arms after another moment of the heartfelt hugging on the porch, and any relief or pride in having performed such a public service vanished when he shook his head. It was his partner's sign to step in before a snarky comment split the whole thing apart.

"You two will be all right now? Everything taken care of?"

At last Mariana stepped away, her hands sliding from Myde's tear-wet face to brace themselves on his shoulders. Her own eyes were dry but that was more relief than anything else—his mother had never cried in front of him and he could not even imagine what it might look like if she did. He wanted to wipe his own face (how stupid did he look, standing there like a snotty-nosed grade schooler?), but there might as well have been thousand pound blocks strapped to his wrists; Myde thought it honestly might kill him to move out of the dreamy halo of the porch light and the moon-tinted mist. He didn't turn around to look at the officers, didn't want to be seen like that.

"Everything will be just fine," Mariana said, the last two words like two sentences of their own, promise and demand all at once. "My son misunderstood," her marble eyes flicked to meet his, as if they were sharing some private joke, "but it seems like he's figured things out now."

_Figured things out?_ Myde thought, and the words sent the barest of tingles through his senses, the alarm bells charged to ring without any indication there was something to ring about. Something thin and tiny and dark writhed in his stomach and he felt as if he were waking sharply. _Figured what out? What things? Is there something I'm supposed to know?_

What he remembered was the steeling of her mouth, her eyes like storm doors shuttering closed, the recognition and the accusation, the knowledge that they were not the same anymore—the same family, the same people, the same type of being (_had never been the same_, said the voice in the corner of his mind which spoke with all of Ienzo's intonation). What he remembered was the way she, repulsed, had stared at him like an utter stranger, seeing Demyx in that moment, maybe, rather than her son.

What part of that had he misunderstood?

"Next time," the irritable officer was saying, "think of a way to figure things out before you disappear without a word, all right?"

"I'll try," Myde said, and he almost managed to make it sound like a joke. But not enough, apparently, to keep Mariana from hearing the hitch in his voice. Her hand tightened on his shoulder. It occurred to him briefly that maybe that's what she had thought: she had worried so much while he was gone because she'd genuinely thought when he'd run away, he was never coming back—his secret spilled out across the floor, he would move on, back to his space alien home planet or…

Well, hadn't he thought about it? Hadn't he looked at Ienzo yesterday and thought it'd be so much better if they could just get up and go somewhere else, some self-centered and good-natured little world that wouldn't mind they were Nobodies so long as they paid the rent on time? Ienzo's stories made it sound like Twilight Town had some sort of universal appeal.

But he hadn't thought that would mean leaving his mother. He hadn't thought about her at all, in that moment. What would it be like, leaving behind the only home he really remembered—not the only home he had ever known, but the one he knew _now_, and the people he had met and the things he had gained in the world of Dawn City? His mother knew his secret now and she... Reno knew and they were still speaking. Yuffie had called and called… so why, exactly, did Myde still _want_ to leave?

Why? He wondered what Ienzo looked like in colors other than black and white.

He wanted… he wanted to lift the sticky tears from his cheeks with a whistling, to turn the dull night fog into an orchestra, into the nervous vibration before the first symphony note; he wanted to dance and dance and dance.

Looking into his mother's face, her pressed closed lips, her stern expression of relief, Myde knew that he would never, never use his powers in front of her again. Not for shame or fear, but because he could see now that this reunion was conditional. When he—if he—stepped over the threshold back into their home, he would be stepping back into an older life, one where he gave his daily report in Mariana's office between the urgent and unceasing telephone calls, where he pursued a degree he didn't want so he could grow old in a career that didn't really interest him, and where, when he danced in the kitchen, nothing would move and the water would not sing.

His mother had been desperate for her son back. She wanted _Myde _to come home.

"We should go inside," Mariana said at last, fact and finality, except that she was speaking to a person who no longer existed, to the person he had been two days ago and would never be again.

In the dim, golden light and the deep shadows, with the sound of the police car engine shaking the chimes of the dew on the grass, he knew it was all over.

She opened the door.

Myde kicked his shoes off in the entrance hall and watched his mother open her mouth to scold him—but she bit her lip to hold it in: not to be obliging, but because of all the problems they had, putting his shoes in the wrong place should have been the least of them. Except it wasn't really. It was more like the last straw, and Myde could almost see her teeth grinding behind her coral shell lipstick. He waited. He'd said sorry already and didn't know what came after that. What were people supposed to say in these sort of situations? He thought about apologizing again, making it look like he meant the shoes.

"You must be exhausted," Mariana said, with all the ominous splitting of a thin sheet of ice. Maybe she thought that explained things: the careless tossing of his Converse, the running away, the magic… all a by-product of a bad night's sleep. Or maybe, he thought, she said it because it was easy.

_Yeah, totally wiped out_, he would answer, even though it hadn't been a question, and she would press the back of her hand to his forehead like she was checking for fever or could sooth his headache by touch alone, and then she would smile and spin him around like a wine glass stem between her fingers. She would usher him up the stairs and tuck him into bed as she'd done every night until he'd graduated high school. He'd lay there in bed thinking until the thoughts all ran together and in the morning it would be like nothing—nothing—had ever happened.

"Do you…" he started and stalled. "Do you… want to talk… about…"

"My'," she said, the pet name (the possessive) just a little too childish now. It dug under his skin, an itch that blistered the more he thought about it. "I want you to know," she was saying, "that you are still my son, and I will care for you no matter what."

He already knew that, except hearing her say the words made him feel more guilty than anything else; his mother had no idea who she was talking to now. For a half second Myde wished for the sensation of emptiness, wished all the things racing in his brain and pressing in his chest would just drain out—leave a hollow in their place… It would have been perfect, he thought, if he could choose when to have feelings and when not to. He would enjoy shutting shame and disappointment and fear away in a little box and never opening it again.

"We all keep secrets," she continued. A strand of her cornsilk hair slipped out the severe bun into which it had been pulled. "I'm not upset with you," she added. The line of hair fell like a limp hand around the edge of her throat, and he watched this because it easier than watching the hard surface of her gaze. "I was never upset." A loose strand of hair could not betray her the same way an insincere flickering of the eye might.

"I thought you…" He trailed off, noticing belatedly that his mother was fully dressed, her blouse unwrinkled, her make-up fresh and exact.

"My'—" he shivered and still her voice was clear and cold as brook water "—I want you to be happy." She didn't seem to know whether to hold him at a distance or to hug him; her hand was halfway around his shoulders, her nails half-negligible pinpricks just beyond his shoulder blade. "I don't need you to _explain_," she insisted. "If you are not comfortable, then I'll accept that some things really are better left unsaid."

_Some things really are…_ he thought, and then: _But I wanted to explain._ _I wanted to tell you about what's happening and what you saw and why I felt like I had to leave and I really want to tell you about what it sounds like, the music and the water, and how amazing it is and about Ienzo, I_—except that maybe, most of all, what he wanted was for her to _listen_, both of them curled up in the armchair like when he was lonely and ten, and then he wanted her to _talk_, not just to tell him everything would be fine, but to tell him how it would all happen, how he could be Myde and Demyx and keep Ienzo and Zexion and do what he wanted to do and be happy or whole.

"You must be exhausted," she repeated, letting go of him to tuck the loose piece of hair back flawlessly into place.

He stared at her for a long, still moment, and then, at last, he surrendered. "I'm… totally wiped out. I think I'll just go to bed?"

There was the back of her hand against his forehead, the quiet _tsk_; like he knew she would, Mariana turned him around with the appropriate amount of authority, cut and dried from the proper parenting guides. She never quite reached a march but still they made it up the stairs, her hands on his shoulder more certain now. Propelled uncomfortably out of his usual rhythm, Myde stumbled through his bedroom door, fumbling backward for the light switch. He couldn't quite grasp it, and then he was too far into the dark room. Orange light from the street lamp dripped through the slats in the blinds.

Mariana stopped in the doorway once she had pushed him through it, and unlike so many nights before, she did not cross the room with him; she did not smooth down his wild hair or move to press the formless cocoon of blankets in around him. She stood there, the heels of her feet on the threshold, shifting her weight onto the frame, and the diffuse glow made her look more than ever like a young woman or a statuette lit by stage lights. The way she stared silently at him seemed to convey some sad, final message, but he couldn't understand it.

He didn't know what to do with himself then, sensation slipping away from all his limbs until he was sure he existed only as some sort of shriveled thing under her son's skin and the thought of standing in front of her and the thought of crawling into the shelter of the blankets both made his stomach turn.

"You could…" she said after a moment that lasted a breath too long. "You could have told me before."

Except he _hadn't known_—except _how_ could he have told her? How would it have been any different? Even now he didn't know what to say, what words he could put to the things he could do, could feel and could not feel. She was not like them, so how could he ever make her understand with useless words? He was not Ienzo.

And how could she ask that anyway, demand forewarning for something she didn't want to face now? How could she expect him to divulge secrets before he had them and hold them when he needed to share and how could she stare like that, like _he_ had betrayed _her_—

"I'm sorry," he said again, and this time she allowed it, lowered her head in something like a prompting nod. "I love you," he added and the nod became confirmation.

"I love you too," she insisted, turning back into the hall. Her upper hand lingered on the frame of the door, nail polish shining in the dim, and then she was gone. He listened to her heels clattering down the stairs until the house fell silent again.

_Unfair_, he thought. _That's unfair_, although he couldn't figure out what made him think so. Or how to fix it.

Demyx collapsed on the comforter at last, blue patches of quilt rising like water to fill the hollows of his eyes, his mouth, his nose. He breathed it in once and then again, feeling himself contract inside his own skin into a tiny thing, a molecule spinning on a vast and empty plane, adrift in an endless body of water.

_I want to see the ocean_, he thought, half dreaming already.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

But he only made it to half dreaming, and less than an hour later he was awake again, his brains replaced with cotton and his eyelids so heavy he dragged himself up out of bed squinting into the early morning gray outside his window. He could already feel the migraine coming on.

His messenger bag lay across the room where he'd discarded it two days ago, and stumbling rather piteously over to it, he tugged out his wrinkled scrub. It fit like it was supposed to, and his sleep-addled brain added that it felt a lot like home. Which meant his higher functioning had yet to kick in.

He drifted into his cramped bathroom and, squeezing his eyes shut, clicked on the fluorescent overhead light. His eyes stung for a moment behind his lids, and it was a long time before he even dared to peek. At last, still squinting, Myde slouched to the sink and—and met his own gaze in the mirror, except that the person looking back was definitely not _Myde_. His heart skipped a beat. Or several. Stiff, wary, he leaned forward, and the person on the other side of the mirror did the same, wore the same bemused expression, blinked in time to his blinking, but…

Since when had his eyes been blue? It wasn't a massive change, like he'd woken up with glowing red irises or anything (no offense to Vincent), but the subtle degree of difference made it all the more alarming, and he leaned even closer to the mirror until he could see the stroma of his eyes, his pupils contracting to pinpoints.

His eyes were definitely more blue than yesterday, and not just because his scrub was a shade of navy—his irises looked like they'd been taken out and washed in lake water; pale and bright, they were almost aqua and as eerily familiar as they were foreign.

Even worse, they made the rest of his face look _off—_like some unnamable thing was out of place… He stared for a long minute and then another, turning his face one way and then the other. The sensation of wrongness multiplied and gathered as nervous churning in his stomach, a terrible itch under his skin, and he even tilted his head back to look at the very tip of his nose as if that might be the source of the problem. What _was_ it? What was missing or misshapen or…

The fluorescent bulb overhead hummed nearly imperceptibly, filling the room with a sterile light that turned the off-white walls dull grey. Myde thought suddenly about the voice from his dream so long ago, the void world, the dark place with the distant humming like a droning instrument, wind like water, and _Demyx_, Demyx saying _it's a prison made from your memories_ and it occurred to him without warning that there was just too much hair on his head.

What he needed was… He fumbled his way back out of the bathroom and through the battlefield of laundry strewn across the floor. At his desk he pushed aside cluttered sheet music and chewed-on pens and old homework. He opened overstuffed drawers and chucked their contents out into the room until he found what he was looking for at last.

Returning to the mirror, he lifted the pair of dull scissors to the side of his hair and began to cut.

The feeling of lightness (lightheadedness) and the sensation of cool morning air close against his scalp felt strange for a moment, and Myde ran his hands along the sides of his head, newly cropped and prickly. Then he dug under the sink for the bottle of gel, combing it through along the top—and what had felt strange, instead, felt perfectly normal.

He looked back at the mirror; the images at last seemed to match. In the artificial glow of the bathroom, the navy color of his scrub bled black, and if he imagined hard enough, he could feel the weight of a heavy silver zipper and a draping hood.

_Who do you think you are?_ the voice from that far-off dream echoed in his mind again.

He still thought this mulhawk style was ridiculous. But it was also very much _him_.

Snatching his bag and uncovering the keys to his mother's _Gale_—really, when was Cid going to finish repairing Flounder? It'd been like a million years now!—he tiptoed down the stairs, hesitating every step of the way. He did not want his mother to be waiting at the end of the stairs or down the hall—or waiting at all. What would she have to say now?

Honestly, he couldn't even imagine the rest of the day, what it would be like to talk to her… even something as routine as telling her what he'd done at work or how he thought that was going… When he had been overcome with relief knowing she did not hate him, it had never occurred to him that hate, at least, was a _certain_ thing—led to a certain unchangeable chain of events which he could (perhaps) have weathered and survived.

Instead, all Myde and his mother had was the uncomfortable, wary place between two manageable extremes, uncertainty from which moving forward and moving back both seemed impossible… A hollow place, full of fatalistic complacency and dreadful yearning. It felt familiar in more ways than one.

This, he thought, was why Nobodies desperately searched for their hearts—to become _something_ again, even if that was something was dead.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

And then _The End_ Ienzo wrote, as if the words themselves could stop the stars from turning.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde nursed the _Gale_ onto the main street of the gated community; he had a driver's license, sure, but putting him behind the wheel of a car had always seemed like a bad idea, and even now, after driving to work for weeks, he wished for the coughing of a moped engine and rattling handlebars.

It certainly would have made punching in the gate security code a little easier. Fumbling with the power windows buttons, Myde opened both back windows and then the front passenger window before he succeeded in getting his own rolled down.

He leaned out toward the pin pad, and looking up from the console, came face to face with the distorted, maniacal grins of three twitching monsters.

Myde let out of a scream approaching ear-shattering decibels; all the water in the nearby gutter jumped in alarm.

The witch, the devil, and the… skeleton burst out in a fit of shrill giggling.

"We got him!" the witch shrieked.

"You mean _I_ got him!" the devil crowed.

"Did you see his face!" the last one cackled.

At about that moment, his ears ringing, breathing in great panicked gulps, Myde realized he was not looking at three grotesque figures from Vincent's stories but at three rather obnoxious children in freaky Halloween masks.

"Who are you kids?" he muttered, not expecting to be heard over their squealing. But—

"Lock!"

"Shock!"

"And Barrel!"

—he had to jump again as they fervently introduced themselves. His ear was going to be ringing all day at this rate.

"How'd you even get in here?" He knew these kids were not Aurora Heights stock. The people who lived here were his mother's people, and no one like his mother would name her child "Barrel." Or "Shock," for that matter.

The children were clustered up inside the guard booth near the gate, only their long faces (still behind masks) visible through the window. They conspired in whispers, but, being at roughly ear level and given their lack of indoor voices, Myde heard every word.

"Should we tell him that?" the one named Barrel mused.

Shock scoffed. "Of _course_ not, _stupid_!"

"I'm not stu—"

"It's none of _your_ business how we got here!" Lock decided at last, rounding on Myde with all the authority of de facto leadership and certainly too big for his britches.

He was cut down immediately when the girl named Shock elbowed her way to the front and lifted her witch's mask to reveal an equally enormous hawk nose below it. Her eyes were tiny black beetles glistening where they sat, narrowed, in her face.

"What _we_ want to know is—" she began.

"—do _you_—" Lock continued.

"—want to _buy _something?" Barrel finished.

Buy something? _It's like five in the morning!_ Myde thought about complaining. _Start your lemonade enterprise at a normal time of day!_ He also thought no, he didn't want to buy anything, and—he took another look at their huge toothy smirks (too much like Chester Carroll by far)—whatever these kids had, he was willing to bet half of it was stolen and the other half was fake. And where the hell had they come from anyway? They'd be in for it if the manager Phillip caught them playing around like this.

Myde did not say any of that. Somehow, looking at their eager, mischievous faces, he was instead compelled to say, "What have you got?" Only after he'd said it, Myde remembered he had no cash at all, but by that time it was too late.

They burst into triumphant snickering again, and Shock kicked at Barrel while he fumbled with an old, over-sized purse that looked like it had been fished out of a garbage heap or filched off a biddy so old she wouldn't even have noticed it missing. It might have been white once but now it was a dingy grey, and it shed a few sad sequins as they hauled it up. Lock frantically brushed off a sequin that landed on his shoulder like a normal child might have brushed off a venomous snake. Probably Lock was the kind of kid who liked venomous snakes, Myde thought.

Shock was already in pushy sales mode by the time he looked back at her.

She cleared her throat. "If you'll look at this—" she paused for about half a second and no one moved. "—at _this_!" she repeated, and Myde suspected that someone's toes had just been stepped on, because Barrel jumped and Lock growled, scowling behind his devil's mask. Still, he reached into the bag and pulled out a giant swirling lollipop. Its brilliant colors might actually have enticed Myde if it weren't for the fact that someone had clearly taken a bite out of it already and the bottom half appeared to be growing fur.

"Uhh, not exactly what I was looking for…" Myde cringed back away from the rotting sweet. Hey… Since when had he been_ looking_ for something anyway?

"Just—"

"—you—"

"—wait!" the children chorused, eerie and irritating all at once.

This time they pulled a dead rat out of the bag. Myde vehemently shook his head no and the three little monsters shared a dubious glance, as if they couldn't imagine someone turning down a dead rat for sale.

"Tough customer, hm?" Lock hissed between his disturbingly pointy teeth.

They hefted a skull out of the purse next. Myde hoped it had been donated to science, and not dug up out of the ground.

"A flea circus!" Shock displayed next.

"They're trained!" Barrel insisted.

A suspicious black mushroom followed, and a rusty eyelash curler. And a taxidermied bat and a bear stuffed with cotton but its whole face missing and something that looked (and smelled) like it had been a Heartless once. And a saucepan with some neon green substance caked to the bottom and a moldy old pumpkin and a cassette tape of Queen and a baby doll with no arms or legs and amid all of this clatter and wreckage, something flashed, catching his eye.

"What's that?" Myde asked, pointing.

"This?" Shock sneered, holding up the thin black band. She inspected it for a moment, deep blue beads clinking against one another and the dangling red charm. "It's trash!"

"Where'd it even come from?" Lock grumbled, oozing contempt. Both he and Shock turned glares on Barrel.

"Not from me!" the skeleton child protested.

Shock made a move to toss the thing as far off as she could through the booth window.

"Whoa, wait!" Myde flung out a hand. "I'll take it if you don't want it!"

Her beetle eyes narrowed even further, and Lock's look became downright calculating.

"Oh, _really?_" the witch drawled. "And what would you pay for something like this, huh mister?" She held out the band for Myde to take a good long look.

A sinking feeling started in the pit of his stomach. He didn't have any money, but he was pretty sure he _needed_ this thing.

It was an anklet. The dyed twine was pitch and night sky, a darker shade of black than he'd thought things could ever be, and it was wound tightly around itself, close on braided. Three deep blue beads slid over the twine, the center bead largest, such a vacuous hue it felt as if his eyes would slip free of his head and fly right into the depths if he stared too long. Between these, two sharply tipped triangular charms dangled points downward. They had to be colored glass, but they were strangely faded, one a milky red and the other green.

He had never been a jewelry wearer himself but every shard of sense in his body—including the nerve-wracking prickle of déjà vu—was telling him to do whatever it took to get that anklet into his own hands.

"You just said it's trash," he tried. "I'll take it off your hands?"

"That won't work on us!" Lock's lilting voice made the sinking feeling in Myde's stomach morph into an outright sinkhole. He should never have shown his interest in the thing around shrewd brats like these…

"'Sides," Shock added, "I was just testing. We knew all along that this'd be what you wanted!"

"We did?" Barrel asked, and was met with a hard elbow in each of his sides. "Ow!"

"So make it worth our while, huh?" Lock motored on.

Myde groaned. He almost felt like knocking his head against the steering wheel. Of all the times for these kids to show up, for him to suddenly develop a weird fetish for tribal jewelry,_ and_ for him to be totally and utterly out of cash. This was brand new icing on the cake of suck that was his life. Really, even by his standards, this just was ridiculous.

But he also couldn't walk away. Drive away. Whatever. He'd never seen that kind of bracelet in a store before and something told him he never would. If he let it go now, he probably wouldn't get a chance to buy it off them later. (In fact, he had a sneaking suspicion that the moment the caretaker found them, they'd be out on their bottoms and he'd never see them again, period.)

"Okay, I do want it," he mumbled at them, "but I haven't got any money right now, so if you give me ten minutes, I'll go an ATM and—"

"_Money?_" Shock shrieked.

"We don't want _money!_" Lock added.

Myde's head went rather empty as it attempted to do the math. _Do you want to buy something?_ plus _Make it worth our while!_ equals…

"You don't want money?" He blinked once, twice, three times. And then his rather owlish expression narrowed into something distinctly suspicious. If they didn't want money, then… "I'm not giving you my car—" he tried to say, but Barrel beat him to the punch.

"We want a _scare!_"

"A… scare?" Myde parroted.

All three of them threw their masks up into the air and caught them, jumping and twirling where they stood like their anticipation was a poisonous brew bubbling over. They couldn't contain themselves, dissolving into an odd, cramped dance that was mostly pushing and shoving.

"Show us something _scary!_" Shock demanded, her sing-song voice the sound of an ancient door creeping open.

Lock wriggled his thin fingers like worms. "Something terrifying!"

"Something ghastly and grim!" Barrel stomped his feet.

Myde sat back in the driver's seat, at a loss. "And if I show you something scary, that'll make it worth your while?"

They shared a look. Lock stroked his pointy chin and Shock tapped on the end of her nose.

"It'd have to be _realllyyyy_ horrible to pay for something as nice as this!" she declared at last.

"The grossest thing ever!" Lock insisted, and all three of them bobbed their heads in exuberant nodding.

Myde leaned his head back against the _Gale_'s heated leather headrest. Something scary. Something terrifying, and ghastly and grim. The grossest thing ever. Heartless came to mind, but he had nowhere to find them, and he didn't have a hand for drawing or telling stories, so he couldn't steal anything from Vincent… He could roll his eyes back into his head and pull some hideous faces, but considering the fact they were toting a roadkill rat around in a bag, he doubted his scary faces had a chance.

And even if he used his powers, there wasn't anything particularly scary about water. In fact, while dancing water could be pretty impressive, Myde was about a hundred percent sure it wouldn't even faze the creepy little tricksters in front of him. _Boring_, he could practically hear Lock droning already.

So what could he do? What did he have around that they'd find frightening? Something ghastly, something…

And then _Oh_, Myde thought. _Oh_.

It was the worst idea possible. It could go wrong in a million ways and then it'd be on his karmic record forever, so far into forever that if he ever got reincarnated again, it'd definitely be as a bug. Maybe a goldfish, if he got lucky. There was no way anyone would believe them, though, right?

As Myde watched them haphazardly toss the anklet back and forth—Lock and Shock turning it into a game of monkey-in-the-middle over the top of Barrel's head—the glittering charms catching light he didn't even know was shining, Myde thought he didn't particularly care. It could go hideously wrong, and still, that thought didn't bother him half as much as it should. A Nobody thing, most likely, his guilty conscience shutting down…

It might not even work, really. He could give it a try with that belief in mind, and then it wouldn't bother him even a tiny bit. Just because he _called_, didn't mean anything would answer…

"Well, get a move on mister!" Lock prodded.

_I hope it works_, Myde groused inside his own head, and then, on some other wavelength entirely, he tried to empty out his thoughts. Tentatively, shyly, he called out, _Are you there?_

For a long moment there was no answer, and Myde felt increasingly foolish. What? Had he thought it would be that easy? What if they weren't always at his beck and call? Or what if there was something else required to reach them or what if they knew this was a stupid task and just didn't want anything to do with him because he wasn't even their master anymore anyway and—

And then it seemed as if the air itself was shuddering around him before everything went deathly still. The air didn't move. All sound died away—he couldn't even hear his own breathing or the buzzing of water vapor in the morning gloom. Lock, Shock, and Barrel finally froze where they stood, darting glances at him, each other and out into the brilliant sunrise as if they too sensed something amiss.

Myde felt as if everything was emptying out of him, water escaping through a sieve. From somewhere deep inside the hollow of his body or his blank mind the monster choir sang.

_Lord Demyx! _ the voices clamored. _Needs us? _

_ U-Um, just _one_ of you._ He held back a shudder, repeating Ienzo's words as a reassuring mantra in his head: _they live to serve, they live to serve, they live to serve_.

_ One? _the voices repeated, and then fell silent for a second that stretched into an eternity; it was a loud sort of silence, however, full of that unsettling sensation of things going on behind the scenes. Myde had a feeling there was a great deal of conversation to which he was not privileged taking place in the dark void worlds. It might have made him even more nervous, except for the distinct and inexplicable feeling that they were arguing over who would get to go.

At last, there was that rippling in the fabric of the world itself, and the voices singing said _This one will go_, although so many of them said it Myde still had no idea who, exactly, was coming. That was just as well—there was no way he'd be able to tell them apart.

_ B-But no hurting anyone!_ he added as quickly as he could muster the words. _Just… spook 'em a little!_

_Spook? _a lone voice trilled then, and by itself it sounded weak and almost timid. Except it was a Nobody, he thought: empty, empty, empty. The voice hesitated a moment, and then, with something like a shadow of shame to admit it needed help, it whistled, _How?_

_Just…_ Myde couldn't even begin to explain, and he wondered how bizarre he must look to the kids, staring off into space, gone away into the recesses of his own mind. _You know what,_ he thought finally, _just stand there and be you._

Sound and the motion of living things rushed back into his ears in an instant, just in time for him to hear "He hasn't got anything to show us!" and "Nothing scary at all!" He turned to look at Lock, Shock, and Barrel where they were clustered in the guard booth, staring down at him with varying degrees of scowl and pout, visible even beneath their masks.

"We won't give yah nothing!" Lock taunted at exactly the same moment as the trembling black and violet wormhole opened in the air behind him.

The Dancer wriggled silently out of the dark depths, suspended in the air as if gravity had no effect. Its pink beanie lay low over its eyes—if it had eyes—and yet it surveyed the guard booth with sentinel-like solemnity. It seemed to be trying to stand still, but it twitched a bit; it was unused to stillness and wanted to kick and sway its way around.

Myde watched, biting the inside of his cheek, half to keep from cringing in fear of the ugly thing and half in anticipation. The three children remained bizarrely unaware, bickering amongst themselves.

One of the Dancer's soundless twitches at last brought both its feet up, and to avoid harming anyone with the bayonet spikes of its toes, it threw out its legs out; the wicked blades on the tips of its stilettos curved around Lock and Shock in a grotesque mockery of an embrace, trapping them in place on the edge of impalement. To balance itself out, the Dancer hastily clapped both its hook hands down onto Barrel's shoulders, a vice falling like a guillotine.

Even from where he was sitting, Myde could see the blood draining out of the children's faces under the edges of their masks. They froze so still he was pretty sure they weren't even breathing. The Dancer writhed a little, stretching its torso down at an impossible angle, its rubbery waist folding nearly in half so that its face could reach their eye levels. It poked toward them, and its sewn-shut lips strained against the stitches as if it was trying to breathe in their scents through its mouth. Not like it had a nose, after all.

Myde shuddered, and as he watched, Lock and Shock creaked their heads around like rusty hinges or broken animatronics, in jerking little motions, until they were face to face with the monster. Barrel leaned his head back, just in time for the tentacle of flesh from under the Dancer's beanie to loop back and wrap itself (albeit loosely) around his neck.

If Myde had to hazard a guess, he'd say the Dancer was rather disinterested in what it saw. But there was no way Lock, Shock, or Barrel could tell that, and so its belled out suture lips and clamping hands could only be taken one way…

Shock let out a scream to rival fire engines, with Barrel and Lock's background vocals imitating nails on chalkboard and shrieking cats. Wildly shoving and jumping over each other, they forced their way out of the Dancer's clutches and tumbled end over end out of the guard booth, frantically fleeing across the road.

They didn't stop until they'd put the nearest tree between them and the monster (and Myde, who leaned to peek out the passenger-side window). They stared around the edge of the tree, wide-eyed and shaking like leaves.

The Dancer swayed in place, turning to look at him. Myde shivered a little, but now any real sensations of revulsion were dulled by the fact that the lesser Nobody had done exactly as Ienzo said it would: it had followed his orders, and now it was... waiting for something?

"Erm… thanks," Myde said, and the Dancer cocked its sightless face to the side like a dog might. It kept on swaying and staring. "Um, good job?" he tried. No change. How about… "Could you grab that?" he pointed toward the anklet which lay strewn among the other…treasures on the guard's desk, utterly forgotten by their impish owners.

The Dancer sprung into motion, quite literally, leaping toward the desk like its sole prerogative in life was to obtain whatever its master wanted. Sloppily grasping with its fingerless hands, it held out of the prize—

"Eugh, no, not that one!" Myde pushed himself into the _Gale_'s central console to get as far away from the dead rat as possible. "The little black one—not the mushroom!" he added quickly. "Or the bat!"

At last the Dancer slipped the anklet into Myde's hands, its hook limbs cold and rubbery against his warm palm, and he let out a rattling breath that was part nervous and part strange and unfamiliar relief. All this work for some sparkly bits of glass, and yet… He held it tightly, the twine pressing into the folds of his hand, and some fragmentary piece inside him felt as if it was sliding into place—another shard of the great stained window dropped into the mosaic—

He caught Lock, Shock and Barrel whispering to each other out of the corners of their mouths over by the tree, but their beady eyes never left him or the Nobody hovering uselessly behind him.

He thought about giving his uncanny servant another round of thanks, but something told him the Dancer wouldn't understand the praise no matter how many times he offered it. Or it couldn't feel appreciated even if it wanted to. "You can go," he told it, and with a rhythmic nod and a tapping of its heel, it slithered back into the Corridor of Darkness—its arms full of dingy sequined purse. Well, that hadn't been in his orders…

Unable to hold back a grin, Myde lowered the passenger window and flicked the anklet around his index finger.

"I'll keep this!" he called.

At long last, he was able to key in the community pin, and the gate swung open like a castle's to release him into the city. The _Gale _eased silently forward, but behind him Myde could already hear Lock, Shock, and Barrel squawking like shrill birds. Except it didn't sound quite like traumatized protest—

"That was _soooo_ cool!"

"Cooler!"

"The coolest!" In the rear-view mirror, Myde watched as they threw themselves out from behind the tree so recklessly Barrel actually crashed down onto the ground and both Lock and Shock trampled over him.

"The best scare ever!"

"By far!"

"Next time do it _again!_"

"Something even _scarier!_" Shock squealed, waving her mask like a farewell pennant.

Shaking his head, Myde looked away from the mirror at last. Flagrant, ego-boosting misuse of power aside (Myde had a sneaking suspicion what he'd just done would have broken a half dozen Organization secrecy rules, even if he couldn't quite remember any of those rules), if he ever ran into those kids or their dead rat again, it would be too soon. Or—

He chanced a glance down at the dash. Specifically, the clock.

"Late," he groaned. "Oh my god, I am _so _late." But the black anklet was warm in his pocket.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"Even Aerith chewed me out," Myde whined, leaning back against Ienzo's knees piteously. After so many days under the artificial glow of the hospital halls, the noon sunlight in the garden felt concentrated, clear and just warm enough. It brightened even the air, made the shrub leaves shine gold and the sky too blue to look at. Myde closed his eyes, drifting between the still, living warmth against his back and the sunlight gathering on his upturned face. Sparrows, chirping and scolding, darted in and out of the bushes nearby, but the loudest sound was Ienzo regularly turning the pages of his book.

Myde pouted, although he couldn't be bothered to open his eyes. "You're ignoring me, aren't you?"

Ienzo turned another page. "I'm trying to."

"You didn't even ask about my hair." Myde huffed out a breath that made the loose strands dangling down his forehead jump and tickle. For a moment he could feel Ienzo's eyes inspecting the new haircut, but then the other boy shrugged, jostling Myde the barest amount.

"It seems normal to me," Ienzo muttered at last, and Myde felt the weight of his gaze disappear a second later.

"Normal!" Myde griped, finally opening his eyes only to furrow his brow. Tipped backward and with the book in between them, all he could see were Ienzo's eyes flicking back and forth as they followed lines of words on the page. His blue eyebrows were drawn together in consternation or something like it, and Myde took another look at the volume in his smudged hands.

It was oversized—must have been heavy—but Ienzo held it steady in a long-practiced grip. Myde struggled to read the title with his head back, eyes half crossed. _Birds of the World_. A close-up of some scary, red-eyed hawk or another graced the glossy cover. What the heck could Ienzo find so important in a picture book of birds?

Myde shook his head, gelled strands catching on the course fabric of Ienzo's pants. In the sunlight the incurable bookworm looked twice as out of place as he did in the hospital. The hollows under his eyes were darker in counterpoint to the brightness, and Myde wondered how many nights he had gone without sleep now, too full of memories to rest. The light washed him out, diluted him until the edges of his shoulders, his hair, his elbows seemed to blur into the golden air. It would have been beautiful except they'd both faded away to nothing once already, and Myde didn't want that to happen again.

"Normal… That's funny," he managed finally, non sequitur after the long silence. "'Cause I'm pretty sure I picked this style to stand out." Myde ran an idle hand over the short hair on the side of his head, bumping Ienzo's knee. He closed his eyes against the gleaming of the light again. "Demyx did, I mean."

"You," Ienzo corrected, although his nose stayed buried in his book.

"I guess so…" Myde surrendered, letting the conversation lapse back into silence. The rhythmic turning of Ienzo's pages and the near silent drag of his fingers along with the lines was lulling, joined with birdsong, and somewhere a lawn sprinkler sent shocks of mist into the air that hummed in Myde's head like shivering wind chimes. The thick scent of lilac carried by the breeze made the air heavy and slow to breathe in. And the sunlight remained just the right temperature, a sleepy, content warmth…

He couldn't be late to work and then get caught napping on the job, but he couldn't be bothered to stir either. Although he wouldn't go so far as to call it peace, there was a settling feeling here, the whole world slowing down around them, reducing itself to the whispering sounds of Ienzo breathing the book's words over his own lips, the diamond dust mist on the lawn, the occasional shade of the tree leaves stretching in the wind, to his heart beating at a resting pace inside him, and if this second's pause could just go on forever—

Ienzo turned another page, and in the silence the brush of paper on paper was loud as a megaphone. A hitch (or something like it) in Ienzo's whispered reading made the individual words suddenly audible to Myde, something about "in other words"—except this was Ienzo, so Myde couldn't help but hear "other worlds" instead.

_Other worlds… In other worlds…_

"You know," Myde murmured, drowsy, barely thinking. "There are a lot of places I want to go." Ienzo made some noncommittal sound which was supposed to mean he was listening but didn't quite make it. Myde continued, regardless. "Big places and little places. Twilight Town, and like… when was the last time you went to a movie?"

Ienzo shrugged, and then a minute later he added, distantly, "_Green Planet_, with my fifth grade class."

Myde shifted in surprise, crunching the top of his hair into Ienzo's book. "_Fifth_ grade? Have you never seen _Pulp Fiction_? _The Matrix_? _Fight Club_?"

Ienzo stared over the edge of his book, one steel-blue eyebrow quirked. Hazarding a guess, he said, "The hospital only screens family appropriate movies."

That information took a moment to sink into Myde's mind, and when it did, what came back first was Aerith's voice, fresh from being unfamiliar, bracing, saying _Almost ten years… he has been here almost ten years…_

"Have you ever been to a concert?" He stared backward but Ienzo had gone back to looking at the pages. "Played video games?"

Ienzo huffed. "No," he said finally.

And the stilling feeling inside Myde was different now, no longer satisfied or warm; he felt like a clock suddenly wound down, all the right gears and levers slipping out of place and jerking to a halt, the planet's revolving going on without him. Everything seemed to be speeding past while he remained rooted to the green earth. Ienzo had been here ten years. While Myde had been struggling and then climbing into the lap of luxury, playing the newest RPG sprawled out on Yuffie's couch and sneaking out to catch midnight showings of _Attack of the 50-Foot Pillbug_ with Reno and Rude, dragged along to the troll the mall with Tifa or listening to Vincent read, Ienzo had been… what? Borrowing books he'd read a hundred times already from the rec. room library, playing chess by himself for lack of a sane partner, and talking to Aerith on a good day?

Who had he played with, growing up here? Who had he told his teenage secrets to, or swapped numbers with, or tricked into Truth or Dare or…

"Have you ever even been on a date?"

"What does that matter?" Ienzo replied, his face disinterested or unreadable maybe; he abandoned the pretense of studying the book again to stare down at Myde over the edge of its cover. "That would serve no—"

Except it did matter, didn't it? It counted up, after all, every missed opportunity, every silence, every broken promise and skipped milestone, every word, all of it—and how much better not to have a heart, if all he could put in it were endless lonely hours… This miniature world was even smaller for Ienzo, a prison of clinical smells and tray meals and the knowledge that there was _more_ to the universe and to living.

And inside all of that to be incomplete, empty in an empty world, totally alone…

Myde felt sick, the dark side of drunk when the world seemed to jump from one edge of his view to the other, spinning, melting into base colors and slipping away between his fingers no matter how he wanted to reach out for it. His body felt like cast iron, his bones loose support beams rattling inside; he couldn't move even if what he wanted to do most was to grab Ienzo and run, keep running until at last it all made sense, until at last maybe he could make their realities match the science and neither one of them would have to feel anything like this again.

In the end it was all he could do to murmur, "You have missed _so_ much."

The half-second's hesitation between that gesture and the next said everything or almost, in a language too private for Myde or Demyx to understand, and then Ienzo shrugged again.

What else, Myde thought, was there to do?

But there were a _thousand_ other things to do—a hundred thousand other things that needed to be done.

For a moment Myde wavered before the shade of hopelessness welling up behind his eyes (_what could _he_ do what could to fix how he couldn't even the simplest things he couldn't even be a solid person how to make this all right again he didn't even_), but if he had ever had a talent in any of his lives it had been a talent for trusting the easiest of all possible solutions and even if he wasn't sure he could change everything, there _were_ some things he could.

Myde wasn't sure if conviction was an emotion, but as it came over him slowly and surely, he was certain, at the very least, that it was real. It was real and definite and _something_, settling in the space between his lungs or inside his lungs even, filling every dark undiscovered corner under his skin. It moved through him like his blood did, shivering along until even his toes were tingling with an overwhelming confidence and a pleasant heat which no sun or secret garden could compare to. His heart beat hard in his chest but the distance between it and his body, warm against Ienzo's knees, seemed insurmountable, and if the worlds would only come to them...

It built up inside him while he leaned back, his eyes closed, unmoving: a rush of forward motion, decisive but comforting. Who knew how he would have gone on living, whether incomplete or whole, if he never found a final aim, a mark of success (not a purpose so much as notes he could read and follow) and maybe all this time he been stumbling in the dark because he was a Nobody looking inside where there was nothing to be found, but outside—outside there was something and _someone_. His head was spinning, the soft glow of the sunlight through his eyelids sliding out of focus, the thoughts of all the firsts that lay stretched out before them rolling under _I could make a life out of this_. He could make a future out of this and never be tired of it and always know where he should be going; for the first time in a lifetime there was a steady path before him, and Myde knew he would follow it to the ends of the all the worlds… had maybe been following it through all the worlds in all his lives already.

In that moment, in the bell-twinkling of the mist in the garden air, sweet and slow, the violet smell of lilac and stillness holding his eyes closed, Demyx thought maybe he understood Axel at last, and that there were some things worth giving it all for. It filled him until he felt sure he would burst.

"The first thing we're going to do," Myde muttered, venting the overflowing certainty, "is eat ice cream."

Ienzo shifted minutely beneath him, perhaps to show he was even listening.

"And then we're going to have an indie movie marathon. And we're going to play House of the Dead at an old-school arcade until we run the change machine out of quarters. Then we're gonna go to like a million concerts and find somebody in Twilight Town to teach us how to skateboard."

Ienzo laughed, or something like it. "How to surf," he corrected.

Myde was sure the word meant something important, but he hadn't remembered it yet. "How to surf," he agreed anyway. "And every restaurant in every world; I don't even care if they're bad. And a protest rally. I always wanted to go to a protest rally."

"I won't bail you out of jail."

"I'll take you with me."

"I'd like to see you try," Ienzo murmured, and Myde could practically feel the genuine smirk on his face (because in the rare few moments when Ienzo forgot to think about it, all his expressions were genuine).

"I heard there's even a place where you can race giant chickens."

"Who would want to—"

But the inertia of Myde's rambling carried him on. "We'll look for treasure and forge awesome weapons or we'll sit around talking about stupid stuff all day—"

"We do that already."

"—and I'll teach you the rules to Blitzball and you can teach me chess even though I know I'm gonna suck at it; I'll play sitar gigs in coffee shops and you can sit with your book and your earl grey and pretend not to listen. And we'll find the hugest library in the universe—"

"I'm sure it's in Hollow Bastion."

"Then that's where we'll go."

There was more Myde could have said, an infinite list of things he had always wanted to do and things he knew Ienzo never had, but the silence that settled in after his declaration seemed important, impossible to break, and so he sat for a moment between the cool grass and the slowly changing patterns of shade across the hospital yard and waited, though he had no idea what he was waiting for.

Ienzo shifted minutely, took the weight of the heavy book in one hand and let the other fall, so that it filled the space between his knee and Myde's upturned face, smudged fingers ghosting across Myde's temple, his short hair. And then "Yes," Ienzo said. Just "Yes."

Myde didn't feel like he needed to say anything at all, after that.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

He drifted somewhere in the twilight space between waking and napping, pulled down again by the lure of the warm sun and the lull in their conversation. Something else had settled into place, although it wasn't the same—not a memory, but an unfamiliar piece falling in where he had not even known there was a gap. It put Myde surprisingly at ease, made him loath to look at his watch. Any second now the alarm would beep and tell him the lunch hour he'd sacrificed for the sake of their conversation was over.

He didn't want to go ba—Myde's thought was cut off and his stupor somewhat shaken by something rather heavy falling on his head, crushing down the hair he had worked so hard to gel into place.

Shifting grudgingly to look up at what was now balanced on his hair, Myde cracked his eyes open and came face to face with a blurry pair of piercing red eyes and a cruel beak gaping open—Myde flailed away for a second, falling sideways to escape the looming monster. It took him about three additional seconds to realize it was Ienzo's _Birds of the World_. Dropped on his head. Sheesh, was he being that bad of company?

Groaning quietly, Myde dragged himself to his feet. His knees felt so stiff he was tempted to roll up the legs up of his scrub pants just to make sure he hadn't turned to stone, sitting in the same place for so long. Myde finally stumbled his way around and was about to ask if Ienzo thought dumping literature over his head might actually make it reach his brain—but he closed his mouth before he ever got a whole word out, because Ienzo certainly hadn't dropped the book on purpose.

He was asleep. He'd fallen asleep with his head half over the curving back of the lawn chair, even the dark circles under his eyes washed out by the mid-afternoon light. He looked like he really needed the nap (he looked like he hadn't slept in _years_), so Myde reached out to take the fallen book out of his lap.

A half second after he picked up the book, Myde realized there was something very, very odd about it. And it wasn't the birds. It _literally_ wasn't the birds: although the spine of _Birds of the World_ was intact, in-between the covers, all the pages had been cut, a square punched neatly and precisely through the book until all that remained were the white gutters of the pages; where the content should have been there was a deep, hollow hiding place within the volume, and this hiding place was currently occupied—by another book. One look at the purple and copper corner of the hidden book's cover told him all he needed to know.

Ienzo had concealed the Akashic Record inside the boring bird book and had been reading it all day. _Well_, Myde thought, _at least he wasn't ignoring me in favor of pigeons_. And then he thought that it was a good thing they were bad guys, because curiosity had been burning in him since the moment they'd gotten away with the damn book, and Ienzo refusing to let him see it certainly had not helped. And now here it was, open in his hands. Being a Nobody was a convenient excuse in circumstances like these, wasn't it? Honestly, he wouldn't feel guilty about sneaking a _few_ minutes of reading...

Hefting up the heavy book and its even heavier disguise, Myde dove right in.

_It is certain now. The empirical data produces the same answer no matter how we manipulate the variables. The substance that the dark creatures are reaping from human beings has a semi-solid form and yet corresponds to no physical organ and no accountable mass. When examined, it inexplicably defaults to a surface area and volume of zero, despite the fact that our eyes perceive it occupying space. Beneath a microscope, shards of the substance reveal infinite fractal patterns but it contains no organic molecules and emits no electrical charge. It is not living but it is also not inanimate. Scanning with the TRON system has revealed nothing; the program cannot account for the material, the power it radiates, or the role it plays in the biological development of human beings. The substance similarly refuses data conversion. We have lost three mainframes in the attempts. Whatever this substance is—I refuse to believe it is the "heart"—it is, against all laws of science, utterly immeasurable. _

"_Light" and "Darkness"… Xehanort wants us to believe that these are the core building blocks of the matter, but _how_? I must know. The Light and Darkness which he so prizes are equally unfathomable; if it were not for the undeniable changes they effect on our world, I would call them metaphysical at best. "Magic," "strength," "monsters"—these are all quantifiable subjects with experimentation revealing consistent sources and patterns. But what is Darkness made of? Where does it come from? What happens to those who disappear within it? Experiments reveal nothing. There are too many questions and too few answers. It cannot be trusted._

_So perhaps I cannot trust the "heart" either. Tests may prove that all human beings are born in possession of the substance, but where does it come from? How does it form? What is the source of the "heart's" immense power? Can a being live on when its "heart" is removed? Is the substance irreplaceable—"the heart," incalculable as it is, also produced only in some pre-determined finite amount? If it is possible, as Xehanort claims, to artificially replicate the embodied Darkness from living subjects, will further tests reveal it possible to recreate this incomprehensible substance… to create, with our own hands, human hearts?_

_I must know._

_And when we have mastered the secrets of the "heart," put to use its' incomparable force, will further secrets lay themselves bare before us? Xehanort and the master talk endlessly of memories…this too is an unanswerable riddle. Certainly, they claim, memories and the "heart" are intimately connected; although it is possible to exist without recollection, one feels a sense of perpetual incompletion… longing…and without the "heart," what remains is the writhing mass of Darkness the others have taken to calling "Heartless." It possesses no memories, no human instinct… How are the two connected? I have long believed memories related to complex processes within the brain not yet fully understood, but… could it be possible? Could the "heart" be the true breeding ground of memory? Or a more fascinating thought still: could it be that this immeasurable substance, this crude icon torn from the human chest is _memory_ itself? _

_I can hardly rest. My mind is vexed with endless questions. _

_What is memory? What is the heart? How do we lose them?_

_Where can we find them, once they are lost? _

This last line had been circled in unmistakable black marker, and beside it, cramped but legible, were the words _I need to know_, written in handwriting Myde had only seen on violet walls before.

So maybe Myde hadn't understood all the talk about fractals or mainframes or substances; he'd gotten the gist, and, more importantly, what was lurking underneath—what had been driving Ienzo then and what was driving him now, putting those dark circles under his eyes and the moment's hesitation or the sneer in his voice when Demyx said _We do too have hearts! _

"You know…" Myde whispered, fondly, "it's okay if you don't have _all_ the answers."

And yeah, maybe he was leaning in at that exact moment to brush errant strands of hair out of Ienzo's face so they didn't bother him in his sleep, but hey, since he never quite got there it wasn't like he'd have to come up with an excuse to write it off—his hand fell halfway through the motion, because if that blur of pink he'd just seen in the corner of his eye was who he thought it was, he definitely didn't want to get caught… and something was definitely going on.

Habit made him turn and he even got almost through calling "Miss Aer—" before Ienzo made some near-waking inquisitive "Hm?" sound that made Myde flinch where he stood.

"Sorry, sorry!" he whispered, although that certainly wouldn't help matters, and setting the disguised Akashic Record down gently by the lawn chair, Myde took off sprinting across the grass.

Aerith's low heels slowed her down enough that when he pulled open the glass door to the hospital corridor he could see her at the end of the hall, her twisted braid streaming behind her as she ran.

"Miss Aerith, wait!" he called out as he rushed to catch up, only panting a little, really.

She blinked back over her shoulder. "Myde!" For a moment there was a little flicker of relief across her face, but then she gestured for him to hurry, turned back around, and kept running.

He lost sight of her for a bare second when she veered left at the end of the hall, but his longer stride brought him closer and closer, and at last he was running alongside her, desperately trying to keep his feet under him and not slip on the waxed tile and die.

"What's… going on?" he gasped. (All right, he was going to seriously think about working out after all this craziness. Who knew interning in a hospital would be such exercise?)

"It's Kadaj," Aerith breathed, her eyes flared white with more honest alarm than he had ever seen on her face before. "He's gone."

"Gone?" Myde barely overcame the urge to stop sharp in his tracks. The kid was pretty much the devil incarnate, but that didn't mean Myde wanted him to be… "Like he's dea—"

"From his room," Aerith clarified, almost knocking Myde over when she took a sharp right at a corner. "No one can find him. Yazoo and Loz won't say a word." Any sense of relief Myde might have felt for the fact that Kadaj had not left the land of the living was immediately underscored by irritation. He remembered every one of those sneakers' sparkly blows to his shins and there was no way he was letting it happen again.

"Where's Tseng? And Reno?" he thought to ask a half second later, sparing a short glance down a connecting hall like he'd seen the security guards barreling toward them at that very minute.

"They were—" Aerith paused for a breath, the harsh clattering of her heels filling in for her voice, "—training with the video surveillance equipment at the security office. Veld noticed—" another moment's break, "—Kadaj giving Cissnei the slip, but then they lost him."

Lost him. Lost him in the labyrinth of the hospital corridors, its thousands of rooms, closets, crannies—worse, its uncountable number of exits. Even if they called the general hospital security in to check the doors there still might not be enough people for every way out, and if Kadaj figured out the one exit they didn't cover, or worse, had already made his way outside, there might be no way of finding him.

There might be no way of finding him inside the hospital either; the floor layouts were supposed to be the same and yet Myde had never managed to memorize anything beyond the cafeteria and Ienzo's room, and every other corridor felt like a new blind corner in a massive maze. Stepping outside the psychiatric ward into any of the other equally large divisions would be a death wish; Myde would vanish into the endless twisting hallways and never be heard from again. The hiding places were innumerable, so without some solid clue, Kadaj was likely to be lost until he wanted to be found.

Except if they didn't have any clue, where was Aerith running to?

It occurred to Myde belatedly that he had once again failed to ask the most important question. "Where are we going?" he tried to amend, but by the time he finished the question, they'd arrived. Myde wasn't sure exactly _where_ they'd arrived, but it certainly had an air of final destination about it. That and it was a dead-end.

"Where…" Myde couldn't stop himself from trying to ask and then couldn't finish the question once he'd started. The room _echoed_—he wasn't sure it was a room, really, so much as a vast empty space with steel support columns and dark concrete block walls. The lamps on the distant ceiling were naked bulbs, illuminating the place sporadically like stage lights and leaving the rest to fade into shadowed corners. There were tall rows of shelving along the far walls, brimming with cellophane wrapped boxes and wooden pallets. An empty warehouse?

"This is the delivery bay." Aerith, with all the explanations again. "Supplies for the ward are dropped off and sorted here. It's also—" she peered, narrowed-eyed, into the gloom, searching the far edges of the room, "—Kadaj's favorite way out."

Myde did a double-take, staring into the dark just like Aerith—and just like her, he didn't find what he was looking for. "How do you get out of here? Where the heck do things come in?" He didn't see a single door. But Aerith moved purposefully forward, crossing the distance in quick, bizarrely angry strides, and when they approached the far wall, Myde at least realized how Kadaj had gotten out.

The dark patches he'd mistaken for paneling in the walls were roll-up metal doors, attached to huge bales at their tops. They were off the ground so far Kadaj would have had to jump to get through them, and they were definitely too huge for people alone to be using. A semi-truck could have passed through them, probably.

Semi-truck. Semi-truck. Why did that ring a bell?

Myde shook his head to clear the sensation of a nagging thought and inspected the nearest door. There was no button to open it that he could see, and it definitely would have taken more than one little kid to lift it.

"How could he get out this way on his own?" Myde gave the door an experimental tug, and although it rattled on its track, it certainly didn't open.

Aerith shook her head, wisps of brown hair slipping out of their orderly appearance in her braid from all the running. "He was not on his own," she said, and he noticed the frown on her face for the first time. "He had help."

"From—"

"Jafar!" Aerith called, not a shout but loud enough to carry through the cavernous room right up to the glass windows of the operations booth stuffed in the side corner—so far back Myde never would have seen it if a computer screen or something hadn't flickered to life behind the glass, casting an eerie blue glow over the interior of the booth and over the long, narrow face of the man named Jafar.

And then there was an obnoxious squawking voice which echoed right back to them, and behind the computer screen a bulbous shape bobbed in and out of sight as if it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be the center of attention or remain unseen. "It's _her_!" the voice said, in the breathy tone of stage whisper but so parrot-loud everyone in the room could hear. The voice belonged, as best Myde could tell, to the squat and rotund man behind the control panel. His enormous, beaky nose and flat cheeks were an odd color that might have been ruddy in full light.

"Ja_fa_—" the short, plump man began and was hastily cut off by a heavy foot on his toes or something equally unpleasant, given the squeal of pain that rang through the thick glass of the control box. A moment's silence filled the delivery bay back up. "What was that for?" Myde heard then, in a much lower and petulant pout.

The tall, angular man who had stepped on the parrot's toes seemed to occupy an impossible amount of space, completely incongruent to his narrow, stretched body. Something about the way he stood in the control box, raised a few feet higher than Myde and Aerith, seemed to give him some sort of imperiousness, the sly, heavy presence of a man in charge. Or worse, a man who wanted to be. There was something about him that reminded Myde of stick insects: too thin, too sharp, organically deceiving.

"Is there something you _need_, my dear?" the man named Jafar said in the silence, staring down at Aerith, and his voice slithered through the intercom toward them (slithered, quite literally, so much that Myde could hear the dry scales of it rushing against the concrete walls and the far-away metal rafters). It was a disarmingly slick tone, but where the words themselves should have been gentlemanly they instead sent a shiver of revulsion down Myde's spine, tripping alarms in the back of his head that said this was the sort of voice that could never, never be trusted. It brought to mind oil sliding thick and dark and deadly over the surface of clear water, and Myde didn't like that particular image at all.

"Did you let Kadaj leave this way?" Aerith had straightened up until she stood tall and proud, managing somehow to look down her nose at the slimy man even if he was a way's away and elevated above them.

Jafar's sneer was all teeth, the crooked angle of his nose splitting the grin in two. He was leaning, poised, against the side of the parrot man's chair, stroking his long goatee with a wayward hand. Aerith's irritation seemed to amuse him more than anything, and Myde felt his own aversion growing by the second.

Demyx knew bad guys. He'd been one. And this guy was as rotten as week old fish.

"Kadaj, Kadaj…" Jafar drawled, feinting thoughtfulness for a minute and not a second longer. "I simply can't recall. Except—" Myde wasn't sure if it was his accent or if he really did intend to mock them with every too-innocent lilt of his voice, "—I'm certain_ I_ never let a rat run free."

Aerith might as well have been a steel rod standing beside Myde, not the pretty princess but the princess guard. One look at her face had Myde taking a hasty step backward; he had never seen her look like _that_, even when she was staring him down after the mouse-ladle riot. Her face was pinched shut, lips pursed, brow furrowed, eyes distinctively menacing in the most professional way possible. Her frown from before had become a flat-out scowl.

Aerith Gainsborough looked like she meant business, and it was all sorts of scary. Myde tried hard not to cower, but Jafar seemed utterly unruffled—at least until Aerith said, "Try and recall, won't you?" in a voice that was so sickly sweet it made Jafar's snaky tone seem down right normal. There was so much threat in the words there wasn't room for anything else. "I'm sure that Director Yen Sid will appreciate your efforts."

"She's got you there!" the squat man faux-whispered from behind the computer, ruffling a little in his seat. There was a hint of comeuppance in his voice that suited an ill-kept lackey, Myde thought.

"Iago," Jafar murmured, less like a name and more like a warning, the cruel, malevolent promise of disproportionate retribution to come. Jafar's minion stopped his half-mocking twitters like a soldier snapping hard to attention, full of blustering apology.

Judging by the harsh glower that morphed Jafar's face into something even longer, full of even sharper angles, Yen Sid was someone even he did not want to cross. His sunken, shadowy eyes compressed into slits. For a second Myde thought he was going to hiss at them or refuse to answer, refuse in some sort of violent, cosmic way utterly unbefitting the situation at hand—honestly, was he trying to hinder them just out of spite, and how far would he take that?—but then the man's face contorted again as if a nasty smell were being held under his nose, and he waved them away with a stretched, thin hand.

"I might have seen the boy," he scoffed, high-horsed and condescending. That was all the surrender Aerith was going to get out of him, but it was confirmation enough. Kadaj had been through here. Jafar had let him out—no, Jafar had had his lackey let Kadaj out, so that when it came down to it, he could say it hadn't been him, of course it hadn't been _him_. But it didn't really matter _who_ had done it: if the metal bays opened out where Myde thought they did, Kadaj was loose in Dawn City. With the way that kid's one-track mind blocked things out, he was a hit-and-run waiting to happen.

And they were still standing inside.

"If you'd be so kind as to open the way?" Aerith prodded at that exact moment, the high, giggling tone of her voice crashing against the deep frown on her face and dying a quick, bloody death.

Jafar was as slow to respond as he could be, but he did respond. There was another sudden squawk of surprise, another set of trodden on toes or something like, and Iago jumped to serve even if he was grimacing as he did it, punching some button on the operations panel which sent a blinking yellow light reflecting off both his and Jafar's faces. One of the metal bay doors began to clank and rattle its way open (not the door nearest to them, no, they couldn't be _that _helpful).

Before it was even half open, Aerith had crossed the distance to it and was carefully lifting herself over the bottom edge of the gateway, hiking up her skirt and folding neatly under the metal slats. She made it look too easy—Myde scrambled to get up over the lip of the edge without cutting his hands on the door track, and he nearly slipped straight down onto the pavement on the other side thanks to warily watching the door above him. Just in case it fell. It might.

Dropping a bit ungainly to the ground, Myde squinted into the sudden natural light. They were behind the hospital parking structure, a part of the complex Myde had never seen and had never planned on seeing. The sea of cars in the nearest lot, all of them glinting in the sun, made it impossible to tell if Kadaj was anywhere nearby. At the prospect of checking under and behind every car in the lot, Myde felt his heart sink—or he felt all the air going out of his lungs, at least. Aerith _did _look disheartened; she obviously hadn't expected Kadaj to be so far ahead of them.

"He's not here," Myde groaned—except at the exact moment he said it, a glimmer of silver on the main road caught his eye and although the kid was already far off, there was no mistaking Kadaj's short steel hair, his white uniform… Myde even thought he could see those damn sneakers, sparking green nonstop as he pounded down the sidewalk, slipping further and further away from them.

Speak of the devil and he'll appear.

Myde took off running without even thinking, cutting through the rows of cars and over the edge of the sweeping side lawn. Kadaj had such a head start Myde had no idea how he'd keep the kid in his sights—already Kadaj was turning a corner. Myde had to try though; he'd figure it out—

"High Street Cemetery!" Aerith's voice suddenly rang out behind him. He spared a half-second's glance back over his shoulder. Both her hands were cupped around her mouth, one of her heels dangling from her fingers as if she'd been taking off the cumbersome shoes to follow him but thought better of it. "Kadaj is going to High Street. I'll try and meet you there!"

He waved in confirmation and then leapt back into his chase. He didn't know the city all that well, but the massive cemetery he drove by when he took the long route home had always stuck in his memory—mostly because it creeped him out. Nerves would come in handy now. He didn't know any shortcuts, but at least he wasn't going to lose his target. He might even catch up, if he just…

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Of course, he didn't catch up. By the end of the run, winded, amazed at Kadaj's stamina, Myde could see the kid two or so blocks ahead of him, steamrolling through shoppers and Do Not Walk lights and never even turning his head to check if he was being followed. Myde's legs were longer, naturally, but he also had sanity holding him back; instinct made him stop every time he came to a crosswalk or got caught in a crowd of people coming out of the corner cafes.

He inched closer and closer as they continued to run, clutching his side and certain he was going to just drop where he stood at any second, in the middle of a street or not. At a hundred feet separating them, they were passing through the open wrought-iron gates of the cemetery… fifty feet separating them, and he could definitely see Kadaj's sneakers now… twenty feet, and he could see Kadaj straining for every breath too, but not wavering from his path; he obviously knew where he was going—

When Myde was less than ten feet behind him, already reaching out like he could grab the back of the kid's collar from there, Kadaj stopped dead in his tracks. The cessation of movement was so unexpected and so total that Myde ground to a halt too, Converse squeaking against the slick cemetery grass and the edge of a flat headstone.

Myde looked up from Kadaj at last, really taking in their surroundings for the first time since the mad dash through the city began. The cemetery was every bit as creepy as he'd expected, but the miles of jagged tombstones stretching out beside them could not even compare to the monolith hulking right in front of their eyes.

Kadaj had stopped in front of a massive mausoleum, its towering row of columns entwined with marble ivy carved so intricately he could have mistaken it for real. Its ancient façade was betrayed by the utter cleanliness of the stones, no age or rain wear or mold leaving marks on the near black surface. In bold, Gothic letters, the word JENOVA glared down at them.

But that probably wasn't what stopped Kadaj. The boy didn't even see the monument. His acid green eyes were wide and unblinking, trained on the people in the mausoleum's doorway, one of whom had just turned to look at them and now was equally frozen, his blue eyes unmistakable and unmistakably shaken.

"Cloud?" Myde breathed, at the exact moment that Kadaj jerked back into motion.

The boy took three bounding steps up the mausoleum stairs and threw himself, sobbing, into Cloud's arms. "B-Brother!" He half choked on the word. The flowers Cloud had been holding were crushed into a cascade of white and yellow lily petals, drifting in the afternoon breeze like feathers across the dark steps and the shadowed lawn. Cloud clung to the mangled bouquet like a lifeline, knuckles going milk white around the stems even as Kadaj clambered his way into Cloud's hold, leaving little puddles of tears all along the purple sleeveless turtleneck. "Big Brother!"

"Kadaj?" Cloud managed at last, in that familiar, hesitant voice reserved for coming face to face with the ghosts of one's past. The way he said Kadaj's name was full of accent, one too many vowels, the familiar pronunciation of someone long used to the name. He lifted one hand instinctively to keep Kadaj from falling, not a hug but close enough to a comforting gesture.

The sound that came after, evident even over Kadaj's wailing? That was the sound of Myde's brain breaking. Cloud Strife knew Kadaj, the miniature hellion from Rufus Memorial Hospital. Kadaj called Cloud his brother. It was a good thing Myde's brain was still organic matter and not fractals or data conversion or whatever the hell it was the Akashic Record had been talking about, because this was certainly a _Does Not Compute_ moment. Mainframes crashing.

And then the mainframes slipped right out of crashing and straight into dying fiery deaths when Myde at last turned his confused attention to the other person in the doorway of the mausoleum—the other person wrapped entirely in white, obscured by bandage and draping hood, in a smooth silver wheelchair but solid-limbed and uncanny and…

Yuffie's voice carried back to Myde as if from a long distance or a long time ago, saying _At night you can hear the sound of his electric wheelchair echoing through the halls! And they've got him all wrapped up like a ghost because he was so horribly disfigured in the accident!_

A jolt of fear like a pinched nerve ran crackling down his spine. Myde jerked backward, hands rising in some mockery of self-defense, except how could you even defend yourself from a _ghost _and where better to find a ghost but a graveyard but wasn't he supposed to be haunting the hospital and not here of all—

"You're Rufus Shinra!" Myde exclaimed, louder and more shocked than he had ever intended. Over the messy plume of Kadaj's hair, burrowing into his collar, Cloud stared at Myde with a sort of blank confusion, as if seeing a dead guy in a wheelchair and a creepy cloak was not something worth getting so worked up about. And true, about a half second after Myde shouted, he remembered that Yuffie had prefaced her tale with _I heard that Rufus Shinra _isn't dead_!_ Which made this whole thing way more plausible but not any less creepy, really.

"You're… not a ghost?" Myde mumbled to the man in the wheelchair, so quiet he thought for sure no one had heard him—especially not over Kadaj whining incessantly and loudly—but Rufus Shinra tilted his head a little and smiled. It was a close-lipped smile; the white edge of the hood cloaking his face hid all his other features, turning the expression ironic, enigmatic, ghostly.

There were about half a million questions Myde wanted to voice, from why the hospital was Rufus _Memorial_ to how they—Cloud and Shinra and Kadaj and even he, Myde—had ended up in a graveyard together at this exact moment, how any of this was happening, what any of it _meant_, but Rufus's half-smile was like bullet-proof glass: cold, utterly transparent, utterly impossible to get around. Myde would not get any answers. He couldn't even work up the courage to ask.

Even though he was only a few steps from the monument's gapping mouth, Myde felt as if he was impossibly distant from the figures on the stone lip. Maybe they were all ghosts, Cloud with his own inhuman glow, Kadaj a wailing spirit of the unfulfilled… Myde watched them for a minute like an outsider, an uninitiated stumbling on a dark ritual reunion. Except the ritual here felt like it should be called medicine, or science, and the reunion was in no way sweet.

"Cloud?" Myde stumbled over the name once and then tried again, after he'd given his brain the requisite thirty seconds it needed to reboot. He called as much to get answers as to get the man's attention, but, naturally, he didn't get either. In fact, Myde was pretty sure Cloud couldn't even hear him over the things Kadaj had been frantically shouting in his ears since they'd arrived.

"Mother is here—" the boy was insisting, in the half-shrill voice of the very young. "They took her and they—she's here! We have to!" He'd dissolved into gasping, struggling to work the words around the closing of his throat, the wracking trembles which ran from head to toe and threatened to shake him out of Cloud's precarious hold. "They took Mother a-away!" His voice cracked and broke on the high, needy whine, and even his hands, fisted in Cloud's shirt, seemed to disconnect, going boneless and still like his body had transformed into lead. Like there was nothing even to breathe for except the uncontrollable heaving of his sobs. His face was sticky with tears and red, and when he turned his head to disappear further into Cloud, Myde almost missed his quiet pleading, "Help me! You're my b-brother so you have to! You have to…"

Rufus Shinra watched from his chair beside them without saying a word, offering only that same knowing politician's smile.

For all the times over the last month Myde had wished Kadaj would just vanish, every struggle at morning greetings and every muttered taunt sitting Aerith's sessions, Myde suddenly recognized that Kadaj was eight years old and had lived through his mother's death. Myde knew enough from listening in to bring it to mind if he tried: the pitch black night, the rain, half the top floor of one hospital wing ripped away, flung out into the dark, the chemical fire and the smoke erasing the stars, a freak explosion they'd said, the same one that had _killed_ Rufus Shinra, just an accident, and what ward had that been, how close to Ienzo…

Kadaj, Yazoo, and Loz had been waiting in another part of the hospital for their mother, tiny, quiescent, coloring or disdaining the dirty pediatrics' toys; then the monstrous roar, the shaking of the building, the halogen lights crippled and quivering. The phones would have rung, disembodied, too quiet, the short waves tuning into white noise; the nurses would have rushed, snatching them up… They would have been handed into strangers' arms, hurried outside, the heavy doors shutting, reflecting the blinding flares of siren lights and the rain, lit-up, streaming—above the milling of human voices, the cracking of shrapnel, the ambulances wailing, someone would have heard the boy screaming for his mother and what then? Maybe, meaning well, a nameless face had said_, "Don't worry, they'll get your mother out,"_ just careful not to say "alive."

The worst came afterward, in never seeing: tangled in IV cords and sedated for safe keeping by the time Jenova's body bag was ever unrolled, all Kadaj would have had was some other unfamiliar voice saying—hours or days of not-knowing later_—"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."_ Not even a wake for a body in so many pieces… Kadaj had been taken to the funeral (had to have been, to find her tomb now), already restrained by hospital staff, watching them put some sealed casket inside, the doctors checking, _"You understand that that is your mother?"_

The sleek black coffin wood, the silver hinges—

_ "That is your mother, do you understand?"_

Reaching out for her, certain that if he opened the box, he would find her just as he left her: whole, living—

"We have to help Mother!"

At almost twenty-one, Myde had fallen apart at the _thought_ of his mother not wanting him. At eight, he would have died from getting no chance to say goodbye.

There were a thousand things Myde did not understand about hearts and Nobodies and the world. There were a million things he did not know. But, beyond the shadow of doubt, he knew this: what he felt for Kadaj in that moment was sympathy, pure and honest.

He opened his mouth to say this, to ask Cloud to be understanding, to make Rufus Shinra cut off his inexplicable air of taunting, but the words died on his tongue, never needed to leave his lips. The expression on Cloud's face made Myde wonder if everything they said about Nobodies really was true, if all his own feelings were nothing but a sham; the look in Cloud's eyes made Myde's sympathy seem so pale in comparison it might as well have been a dream.

Dropping the crumbling flowers at last to keep a better hold on the boy, Cloud's expression had fallen from shock into something Myde could not even name—he looked like he had seen the world end, like he had seen the world end and survived, the last battered soldier in an endless field of the dead, gazing out over the bodies of the people he loved and knowing there was nothing, _nothing_ left. Cloud stared down at Kadaj, his lips half open like he wanted speak but couldn't manage the words; his eyes were dry but full of bleak despair. The world might as well have fallen on his shoulders.

Myde got the sense he had stumbled on a dark, hot vein of hidden agony and he wished he could be anywhere else at the moment. If it weren't for the fact that he was responsible for Kadaj—if it weren't for the fact that he wanted to know what the heck was going on—he would have left then and there, or at least turned his back to the desperately private scene, demanded Rufus Shinra do the same.

Still, part of him worried; Cloud was not unkind but he could be cold, and none of them were getting out of there without telling Kadaj _something_. Maybe it would be better for Myde to step in now, before Cloud or Shinra broke the illusion, said something like—

"Jenova is not coming back," the man in the wheelchair said, although his tone was less certain than personal, invested, furtive.

Kadaj jerked backward, half out of Cloud's hold, reeling. He stared over at Shinra's covered face with eyes so wide the red-veined whites seemed to swallow his pinprick pupils. "You're lying," he hiccupped. "You're _lying_!" His hands released their crumpling grip on Cloud's shirt only to pound uselessly against his chest. If Cloud even felt the blows, he didn't flinch. "We just have to save her from them and then—"

Cloud shook his head, a flicker of sorrow deep as core of the planet lighting his face before he could hide it.

"You can't save her," Cloud murmured, barely audible from where Myde stood. "She's gone." Cloud looked like he didn't understand at all the impact his blunt words would have. He didn't mean to hurt anyone, but he didn't know any other way to be.

Kadaj choked on his breath, struggled until he tore himself away from Cloud and slipped to the edge of the mausoleum steps. Myde rushed forward to try and keep him from falling, but he was too far; Kadaj hit the ground and laid there, shaking. He dragged himself to his hands and knees then, digging his fingers into the grass, tearing—he seemed to be out of tears, but the betrayal brought a fresh stock.

"You just don't want _me_ to find her!" he yelled at Cloud. "You _never_ loved Mother!"

Cloud disappeared behind a mask, but it was impossible for Myde to tell what that meant or what he wanted to hide, if he was injured or just aware his natural answer would go too far—Cloud said nothing, looked down and away.

Rufus laughed once, quiet, dry, more like a rat through dead leaves than anything else. "There's nothing stopping you from finding her," he said to Kadaj, tipping his head back so that the white cowl fell close over his face, formed shadows over the place his eyes would be. "You were crying about it, weren't you? You know she's here." He rolled the wheelchair aside, leaving the dark entrance of the mausoleum open like a gaping wound between he and Cloud. Kadaj looked into the abyssal room for a half second before he pulled himself to his feet. Myde expected him to run again, that same fixated rush, but he stood without moving for a long time, his fingers knotting and unknotting in the grass-stained knees of his white pants.

"I love Mother," Kadaj declared, as steady as he could, watching Cloud like the words made all the difference in the world, like if he said them with enough conviction, they could change what he would find inside the cold, still monument.

For a half second it looked like Cloud would stop him, do everything in his power to prevent Kadaj from getting to Jenova... but what was left there to find anyway? What good would stopping him do, for anyone?

Kadaj walked past them into the dark. For a silent moment, Cloud met Myde's eyes and something was being said, but Myde didn't understand, he couldn't follow, he didn't know what _any_ of this meant—and then Cloud turned too and went into the mausoleum, Rufus wheeling behind him. Myde was alone.

This was the right moment to hang back, to stay out, but the core of Myde's curiosity had been pricked, and more than anything he wanted to see what Cloud and Rufus Shinra had been doing, _why_ they were here, what was lurking in the darkness—maybe some small part of him even thought they _would _find Kadaj's mother there, and then… Muttering under his breath about cats and what killed them, Myde slunk a little closer to the mausoleum entrance, squinting to see inside.

Kadaj had stepped around a stone coffin in the center of the mausoleum, Cloud and Rufus trailing, and all three of them were headed for the back wall of the monument, where… Myde couldn't see… he inched closer to help eliminate the glare of the sunlight. His eyes took another minute or so to adjust, and then he saw...

Myde wasn't sure at first if what he was seeing was a woman or a monster. The back wall of the tomb was a maze of sculpted wire, black glass, stone and steel in a chimerical mix that looked like it had erupted from a modern art gallery or pages of a science fiction novel. It was a statue, he thought, except that its volume seemed to imply that something lay hidden behind it, held tight within the marble and metal confines of the figure.

Shaped from tempered steel and sculpting, the smooth outline of a woman's face and torso leaned forward into the tomb. The metal plates of her face betrayed no particular expression; where eyes should have been there were cavernous holes behind which Myde thought he saw something glinting. Her waist and legs disappeared back into the wall (or maybe just disappeared), chased by wires wrapped and set artfully where the statue's torso ended.

Where her arms should have been, there were great metal wings, stretching outward and back and filling the wall of the mausoleum like an imitation of winged victory. Except there was nothing angelic about it at all. The body loomed over them—and everything really—like a cruel harbinger of death.

Myde shivered from the very top of his head to the very bottom of his spine. _And that's enough to fuel my nightmares for another century or so…_

And then Rufus said to Kadaj, "This is your mother," and the century of nightmares became something like a millennium.

_This_ was where they had put Jenova's body? Right _there_? Behind the metal façade, they had interred the pieces, sealed her up in the solid wall, maybe still disassembled or they'd stuck together what they could salvage—

Myde felt sick. Scratch that, Myde felt violently ill. He leaned a little, fiercely fighting the urge to retch, even as Kadaj approached the figure, arms outstretched, tiny fingers reaching...

"Mother?" Kadaj couldn't reach her face, had to settle for settling against the tubing bursting from the statue's middle, a macabre imitation of some kind of loving embrace. Then he sunk his fingers into the wirework and began to pull and pull and pull. There was the fixated rush; Kadaj ripped at the statue like he could tear it down with his bare hands, crawl in through it and excavate the pieces of his mother one-by-one. His fingers caught on the unfinished surfaces of the metal, tearing and bleeding, but he kept going, certain that just a little more would… Myde moved to stop him, but of course, Cloud was closer.

He caught one of Kadaj's wrists and pulled the child's hand back, ignoring the thin trickle of blood that ran into his own hand. "What do you think you'll see behind this?" he asked, the tone of his voice not demanding but certain; it would have felt impossible for Kadaj to give no answer.

The boy stared into the dark crevices of the statue with a look resolute and horrified. "Mother," he repeated, as if that was the only word he knew.

Cloud refused to let Kadaj's hand free. Myde thought he might resort to shaking the kid to knock some sense into him, but instead he kneeled down, closer to eye level, and repeated, "What will you see?" Cloud's voice was soft and low but unflinching, and Myde knew (without knowing how) that he would not take Kadaj's simple answer again.

There was aching silence, silence fit to burst, and although Cloud did not repeat himself again the question seemed to echo in the dark stone room, refusing to dissipate. Kadaj took a step away from Cloud, Rufus, and the figure of Jenova, but with his hand trapped he couldn't escape.

The unanswered question grew in magnitude, thickening the air until it loomed larger even than the effigy. Myde felt like he should shout something out just to end it, to give Kadaj some respite—but he bit the inside of his cheek, wondering if Cloud knew what he was doing at all and whether this would come crumbling down on them and break Kadaj into tiny sparkling silver pieces…

Myde felt like he couldn't breathe. He couldn't imagine being pinned beneath Cloud's impervious gaze, no way out, the only answer he wanted to give not the right one, and honestly, what was Cloud expecting Kadaj to say, _I'll see my mother's cor_—

"I DON'T KNOW!" Kadaj screamed at last, ripping his arm out of Cloud's hold and buckling, slamming his knees into the stone floor. "I don't know!"

In the dark, Myde thought he saw Rufus smile again, an edge in it like the moral high ground or fine, cold disdain.

And then Myde realized what was happening. He had a degree in psychology almost and from time to time he had actually done his reading and he knew what was happening now and maybe it could all go wrong but he and Cloud had a chance here to do _something_, something real. All he could hear was Aerith, so long ago, saying _Sometimes I feel like I've saving their lives_. If he could just say the right thing here… but what was the right thing?

"You do know," Myde said out loud to Kadaj before he had even thought the words. "You _do_ know, don't you?"

Kadaj and Cloud both jerked, looking over to him like they'd forgotten he was even there. Probably had forgotten he was even there. He withered a little under the combined force of their stares but for once he wanted to—he needed to—stay strong, do what he had spent all those years in college learning to do and make something right out of this. He needed to solve just one problem here—because if he could solve a problem here then maybe he could solve all the other problems too, pack everything wrong with he and Ienzo back into Pandora's box and…

"You know where we are, don't you Kadaj?" Myde asked, trying to imitate Cloud's silent way of pressing for answers. For a moment it seemed like he'd failed; Kadaj stared at him around the edge of the stone coffin in the center of the tomb as if he couldn't believe Myde was addressing him, didn't process the words as a question at all.

But then he swayed on his scratched hands and dirty knees and trembling, perched on the edge of collapse into dry heaving, the boy choked out a whisper. "A cemetery," he said.

Myde grit his teeth, questioned again if this was the right way. Rufus had turned his head the barest amount to watch him or something like it, no way of knowing what those eyes could see beneath the cowl, what expression they were hiding, what other secrets… Then Myde realized they couldn't do any more damage to Kadaj than had already been done, no matter what they said here, and sometimes the bandages had to come off for the wound to heal. "If they brought your mother here," he said to Kadaj, bracing, slow, "it was for one reason."

"No." Kadaj frantically shook his head, silver glinting even in the dim light. He shifted back on his legs, wrapping his arms around himself like he could hold down his own shivering. "_No_." His tears started again, rolling down the flushed edges of his cheeks and onto the now stained arms of his hospital-issue shirt.

Myde wracked his brain for the right words, the least incisive, the least cruel of all the cruel options. "Kadaj," he said, "did your mother love you?"

"Y-Yes!" he coughed. "I know she…"

Myde took another step closer so that he didn't have to speak so loudly to be heard. "And was your mother a strong person?"

Kadaj's frantic shaking turned into an even more desperate nod; he seemed to have given up on trying to speak around the lump in his throat. He swiped fiercely at one of his eyes, wiping dirt from the monument floor through the tear tracks on his face.

"Then if she were… alive, don't you think she would have found a way back to you—no matter what?"

Kadaj curled in on himself, a tiny child adrift in the dark waters of a reality too miserable for anyone to face, trapped between the unreceptive bastion of his brother and Myde's bladed words, sinking in deeper and deeper. His chest rose and fell so quickly Myde worried he would hyperventilate, but he clung to consciousness, eyes open but unseeing. He was looking back into some happier past maybe, coating the whole world over in a glittering illusion…

"But she…" Kadaj halted before he could even finish the thought. His eyes opened wider and wider, sickly red from tears and failing to blink.

"Think about it," Myde urged, finally climbing the first stair of the mausoleum. "What did they tell you Kadaj? All the people who wanted to help you, to tell you the truth… what did they say?"

There was another period of painful silence, tinged by Kadaj's seizing breaths. "That she… wouldn't… come back…" he breathed at last.

Rufus had realized it long ago, and now Cloud seemed to grasp the problem, what point Myde was driving home. Cloud crossed the meager space between himself and Kadaj but didn't reach out, managing somehow to capture the boy's attention, to focus his eyes on the real world again. Kadaj looked up at Cloud and said without saying anything _please don't please don't you're my brother please don't_—

"Jenova is gone, Kadaj," Cloud said, the sound of a long dream crumbling into dust.

And still, the boy tried, clinging to any shard. "How do _you_ know…" he hiccupped again, fisting his bloody hands in his sleeves.

Myde almost thought he imagined the look of pitch black agony which flickered across Cloud's face, but the way the other man reached out, half-hesitant, and rested his hand against the surface of the great stone coffin in the middle of the room spoke volumes.

Making demands and pleading all at the same time, Kadaj gathered the last wisps of his resistance. "How do you know Mother's g-gone?"

Cloud stared down at the coffin and breathed deeply, just once. "Because Sephiroth is sleeping here too."

It may have been the name, it may have been the words themselves, or may it have been the final confirmation coming from the one Kadaj seemed to treasure like family—Myde could see it happen in front of his own eyes: the utter collapse, the final breath to topple the house of cards Kadaj had used to build his delusion. He could see the world crumbling around him, Shinra, Cloud, Kadaj, all the defiance at last bleeding out of the boy until Myde thought his body would never move again, until even his tears seemed to forget how to fall and just filled his eyes, glazed over and shutting down. Kadaj's hands seemed like foreign objects, dropping heavy and unmoving onto the floor. All he had left was a reality he was still unprepared to face, and Myde was most to blame.

He told himself again that it was progress, that bones sometimes had to be re-broken, but mostly he felt like it was the right thing to do, and all the pressure of concern slid far to the back of his mind when Cloud—painfully unsure of himself—reached out and patted Kadaj on the head.

Myde could have told him how ineffective that would be, but it seemed to occur to Cloud fairly quickly when Kadaj gave absolutely no response. Obviously Cloud did not have much experience comforting anyone (and Myde wondered when Cloud had last been comforted himself—no time recently, it seemed). Myde was about to helpfully mime a hug, but before he ever got there the other man seemed to figure it out, leaning down to Kadaj in a sort of awkward, half-open-armed gesture.

For a moment the boy ignored it, ignored them all, and Myde's worry sparked again at the thought that maybe they'd actually broken him, maybe he'd gone catatonic, but at last Kadaj shuffled the final few inches and slumped into Cloud's arms, still not speaking, seeming to bleed into Cloud's body such that he only breathed with the rise and fall of Cloud's chest.

Rufus breathed audibly, but whether it was a scoff or something softer, Myde couldn't tell.

Uncertain and unpracticed but bowing to human instinct, Cloud ran a hand down Kadaj's back, once, twice, and then a slow repetitive pattern like time itself, soothing all wounds. For a long time—or maybe just a few moments, stretched far beyond their limits—Rufus and Cloud filled the mausoleum and Myde blocked the doorway, waiting for something or someone else to break the silence, waiting for explanations or someone else to do the explaining for them. The only thing that happened was Kadaj drifting slowly into unconsciousness or sleep, exhausted by all the events of the day.

Myde felt exhausted too. Although he was sure they'd been here in the cemetery for a lifetime, it couldn't have been more than half an hour, and he still had to take Kadaj back to the hospital and go on with his work day. God, how would he ever manage that?

His exhaustion was interrupted, jerked back to the dark monument when Rufus wheeled, impossibly without sound, toward the doorway. The cloaked man did not bother to turn his head; he stared blankly beyond Myde to the white square of light and freedom, but the enigmatic, knowing half-smile had returned to his face, not amusement but the exuding of supreme and certain confidence.

"Consider what I've asked, Cloud," he said, letting his voice, a request but almost a warning too, carry back over his shoulder. The moment Myde stumbled aside to let him pass, Rufus Shinra was gone, vanishing into the too-bright of the open air. Myde wanted to follow him with a stare, get a better measure of the man, somehow, from the back of his head, but the look on Cloud's face arrested his gaze and held Myde firmly in place. Cloud had lowered his head, Kadaj tucked almost under his chin, and the heavy furrow of his brow said more than Cloud might in a year. He was angry—at Rufus or himself (more likely)—but under the anger there was a quiet, desperate hopelessness, a crumbling resolution, and Myde thought Rufus would probably win in the end, play them all for fools in whatever game he was leading, like he'd been playing the entire city for years for now, so good at faking dead they'd given him a statue even…

Myde's thoughts were far away by the time Cloud came out of the tomb with Kadaj in his hold, filling the open space before the stairs. Before the_ stairs_—how had Rufus gotten up or down them in a _wheelchair_? And where was he now? Myde looked around, the whole flat graveyard open to his sight, but Rufus was gone, fully and completely gone, and Myde couldn't stop himself from shuddering again._ Ghosts_, he thought.

Maybe all of them were ghosts.

Both he and Cloud stared out over the rows of headstones, Myde looking for Rufus, Cloud slipping away into his own mind until at last he brought himself to ask, "Yazoo and Loz… are they alive too?"

And suddenly Myde remembered that he had been friends with Cloud Strife for months and never known anything about any silver-haired "brothers." And if Cloud knew Kadaj and the others, how had he not pointed them out that very first day, when the confidential patient information had made its way around? But something Tifa said had bothered him, hadn't it? Cloud hadn't even looked...

In light of the shell-shocked mood of the moment, Myde tried his very hardest to tamper down any and all curiosity. But he failed miserably. How _did_ Cloud know Kadaj? Was it possible for two such different people to actually be related? How had Cloud not known his "brother" was even alive? What had Rufus asked of Cloud, and what did all of it have to do with Rufus Memorial Hospital, with the place Ienzo could not escape? Myde didn't want to leave without _some_ sort of answer…

"Yazoo and Loz are okay too," Myde remembered Cloud's question at last. "They all live at the hospital because of… well, you saw," he murmured, his voice low to avoid waking Kadaj. "They've made my life pretty hard these last couple of weeks. He's got a mean kick." The intern tried for a laugh, but it never really made it off his tongue.

Rather than comforting, the quite that stole in after his awkward attempt felt full of frustrating mysteries, the air itself brittle and charged. He had to know, but how to ask—what to ask, even?

Cloud didn't seem the type to give into awkward silence; indeed, it seemed like he could have stood there all day saying nothing. Myde would have to do all the work here if he wanted to get anything out of this situation.

"Cloud…" he started, bracing himself, "how do you know Kadaj and the others?"

For a long time it seemed like Cloud would not answer him at all; his eyes were full of light and the dead but they didn't see anything really, at least nothing from this time or place. Myde was almost ready to try his question again, half sure Cloud hadn't even heard, when at last, some indescribable force seemed to unstick Cloud's mouth, to pry some words out of him. Myde wondered if it wasn't just the strength of everything gathering up inside, boiling over at last until even Cloud had to say something, admit something or crack from the mounting pressure.

"They had an older brother too," Cloud mumbled the words like he wasn't quite convinced they were coming from him. "Much older. You probably knew him—his name at least."

"General Sephiroth," Myde supplied, and the words made Cloud flinch, if only a little.

Cloud looked down at Kadaj like looking back into a memory. "Sephiroth was an incredible person," he admitted, the words halting, full of inexplicable resentment. Even he didn't seem to know how to say what needed to said. "He was my hero. He was the whole world's hero. Everyone who wanted to join the army wanted to join to be like him. But I joined because I wanted to be near him."

Wait, wait… Was Cloud saying—Myde's brain couldn't keep up—

"I worshipped him," Cloud said, resolutely staring across the cemetery, refusing to meet Myde's stunned gaze. "But everything about him was _wrong_."

Myde had no idea what to say. He had no idea what to do really and mostly he wanted to run away as fast as possible because of all the things he expected to be doing with Cloud, having a heart-to-heart was not one of them, never mind the fact that Myde didn't even have a heart to spill out here anyway. And Cloud wouldn't _look_ at him… Myde couldn't help but think he wasn't even part of the conversation really, just another body to keep Cloud from looking psycho while he vented the thoughts thundering around in his own mind, voiced the memories he still had not come to terms with… but holy crap, what a crazy-talk conversation to overhear…

Cloud spoke again, the words a fast, uneven flow; he had to force himself to say them and had to say them quick before they locked themselves away again in his heart and refused to crawl out of the dark, infected corners.

"It was all wrong… I did whatever he asked. I thought that's what I was supposed to do."

Myde thought about the dark tattoo, the agony of so much ink injected under the skin, and Cloud, bearing it without complaint, without a sound…

Cloud continued to pat Kadaj's back but the gesture was surely more for himself than the unconscious child. He caught and worried his bottom lip between his teeth for a moment. "For me, Sephiroth was a god. But I was just… a puppet to him."

That sick feeling was building in the pit of Myde's stomach again and he thought maybe he'd just cover his ears, let Cloud spill out his darkness with no audience except the afternoon breeze, and no wonder Cloud never spoke if these were the things going on his head.

"Sephiroth was insane." Cloud's voice hit a note closer to realization than confirmation though. "And Jenova helped make him that way."

Cloud's hand stilled on Kadaj's back, dangerously close to tightening into a fist. "Jenova was a monster. She didn't love her children, she manipulated them." Cloud's voice was fire and steel, a world burned to white ash, a spitting hatred Myde didn't even need to see to identify. "Sephiroth fed off her. He became convinced he was meant to rule this entire world, and he tested that rule out on me."

Cloud shook his head, the hatred no less present in his voice even as it found a new target. "I was so stupid. We were always at the hospital. I can't remember why… Jenova's cells…" He touched the fine, tangled strands of Kadaj's hair, like pure tempered steel in the light. "I let the doctors do what they wanted. I wasn't really there anymore. This doesn't make any sense, I know."

"Um, n-no… It's fine…" Myde stuttered out a reply at his sudden inclusion. _Actually_, he wanted to say, _you're making me feel like I should just shut up and never complain about anything again_. _Ever_.

Cloud shrugged, not dismissal but some sort of surrender, ascetic, trivializing. "Back then, I couldn't even remember who I was, that I even had a name. When I could think, all I thought was how I would kill to get away. Then my chance came: I found out the machinery in the lab was experimental. It was all unstable."

Cloud wasn't even looking straight forward now; he was definitely looking away, didn't want to make contact with Myde even from the corners of his eyes. The sick feeling in Myde's stomach tripled but now it was tinged with shock, again his thought process stumbling and failing to catch up—

"It was a few valves," Cloud said. "Some holes. Too much pressure in one place. I knew everyone would get hurt, but by then there was nothing left inside me. I really was a puppet, completely empty of pity. I lived. Rufus lived. But Sephiroth didn't. And Jenova…"

Cloud breathed in and then out, a rattling, stabilizing breath.

"Someone bad did take Kadaj's mother away." His hand clenched over Kadaj's back, a desperate hold, full of sluggish familiarity and surprising possessiveness as if the Cloud of this moment wanted nothing more than to protect Kadaj from the Cloud of that time.

And Myde sat frozen in stunned silence, trying to wrap his mind around the words themselves as much as the implications—Cloud had... Could anyone deserve that? And then an even darker thought bubbled in the back of Myde's mind: who was he to even _start_ to judge? Cloud had had a cause; Demyx had ruined peoples' lives for no reason at all. For a shadow of self-satisfaction.

"What did Rufus Shinra ask you to do Cloud?" Myde wondered if that was too fresh, too personal to share, confidential or dangerous. Burn after reading.

Cloud did hesitate, his whole body still as a stone for a long minute. He sighed shortly to himself. "He wants me to come back to the hospital. There are still unfinished things..."

Unfinished things. Like a person emptying slowly of all identity. The cure for early death, maybe, or death itself, the last secret element still needing to be silenced...

Myde shivered, forcing himself to turn away from that abysmal concept and listen to Cloud again, winding his story down, "—didn't read or watch the news reports. They had to write off the explosion to hide their research anyway. I'd forgotten how to live on my own though… I didn't eat. I slept wherever I fell. Leon found me and took me to Tifa."

"Does Tifa… know?" Myde interjected, suddenly taken aback by the fact that perhaps all of his friends had known, all along, and he'd been the only one out… Like always then, the one that just didn't belong…

"Yeah," Cloud murmured. "She's the one who built me back up into something almost like a person."

"That's why she worries so much," Myde realized, "and why she's always hanging around you."

Cloud almost looked sheepish for a moment, his lips quirking somewhere between a grimace and an exasperated not-really-a-smile. "There are probably other reasons for that," he muttered, gone back to patting Kadaj again with the evening out of his mood.

"Er, yeah," Myde admitted, puzzled by the sudden presence of something like a smile on his own face. "Her torch for you _was_ kind of obvious…" Then he laughed: a quiet, nervous giggle. If they were being completely honest here and Cloud wasn't likely to grab the nearest tombstone and beat him over the head for it… "I always sort of thought you and Leon…"

Cloud stopped petting Kadaj for the half-second it took to scoff. He almost met Myde's eye for the first time since they'd started talking, and Myde noticed then that the mood really had changed, although he'd been understandably slow on the uptake.

"No way," Cloud was saying, shaking his head.

And yeah, okay, permitting himself to think about it really sort made it seem ridiculous, the idea of the two toughest people he knew doing mundane things like indie movie marathons and… whatever it was Cloud and Leon did in their spare time…

Wow, what was he supposed to say now?

Myde was spared from making small talk (teeth pulling with no Novocain) by Cloud suddenly straightening, blinking in surprise.

"I forgot," Cloud said, "Cid and I finished fixing your moped."

Myde didn't know whether to be overjoyed at the thought of having Flounder back—or to cringe at the realization that Cloud was probably working for Cid because his sick and twisted relationship had left him with no chance to develop any skills outside of manual labor.

"Um, thanks," Myde managed. "I'll see if I—" He was promptly cut off by the shrieking of tires on asphalt as a little sedan going far over the cemetery speed limit ripped down the road and skidded to a halt at the curb closest to them. His jaw practically dropped when it was Aerith who climbed out from behind the wheel.

"Myde, the construction made it impossible to get here—did you—" she didn't need to finish her rather breathless question, because in the next second she had spotted Kadaj curled in Cloud's arms. She had spotted Kadaj, dirty and bloody, curled up in a stranger's arms.

"What is going on?" Although she sounded more concerned than angry, Myde knew just how much mama bear lurked beneath that pretty exterior and he was not going to risk it when she had to be high on adrenalin from running her car at almost the speed of sound.

"This is my friend Cloud," he jumped into introductions. "Cloud, this is my supervisor, Doctor Aerith Gainsborough."

If Cloud had been a little more open, a little less reserved and distrustful of strangers, he would have been blushing first, the bizarreness of the situation and the significance of the things he had shared far too intimate for the sudden inclusion of a total stranger, bordering close on mortifying… Myde saw the brief flutter of panic that stirred over Cloud's face before he could control it, rein everything in behind his shallow, unbelievable mask and survey Aerith Gainsborough with as much politeness as he generally mustered (which half the time was none and half the time was complete and stiff formality, like a soldier still). Cloud seemed to deliberate a moment, and then offered the doctor a nod of acknowledgement at last. That was a safe gesture, for everyone involved. Well, Myde thought, Cloud had probably used up his word quotient for the next three years with that monologue, so they couldn't expect anything much better.

"It turns out," Myde continued, "that Cloud knew Kadaj before the… um… accident."

Aerith's restraint switched rapidly to surprise and then to wonder, as if she were looking at a breakthrough in the kid's case at long, long last. Probably she was. Myde didn't know about Yazoo and Loz, but Kadaj at least seemed like he could take steps forward from now on.

"How did you know Kadaj?" Aerith asked Cloud, quite naturally curious.

Myde wondered if he should step in and help Cloud again, but would that look odd? He took a moment too long deciding, and Cloud was forced into his self-depreciating shrug again, settling on "It's complicated" as the best answer. A half second later, Myde found his arms full of eight-year-old, and although Kadaj stirred, he did not wake. Cloud backed up, fully shutting down into his own little shell again. Myde respected that. He knew now what it was like to have no answers to give and no strength to even lie.

"I think we should get Kadaj back to his brothers," Myde said to Aerith, giving Cloud the option to exit gracefully.

Cloud turned away, reaching down to pick up the mangled flowers. He looked back for the barest sliver of a moment, blue eyes meeting Myde's, doing that thing again where he spoke without speaking, which Myde would never be able to understand, honestly.

Cloud seemed to realize this. "Tell him…" he said, and it took Myde a second to realize he meant Kadaj, "that I'll come visit. And one day… I'll make it up to him."

"Sure thing," Myde promised.

Aerith Gainsborough's eyes lingered a long time on the pale spikes of the strange man's hair as he walked away, the tense line of his shoulders. Beyond any explanation, she felt quite sure she had met him before.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Aerith drove much more reasonably with Kadaj in the car, but even taking the same odd side streets Myde had run, they still managed to make it back to the hospital in what had to be record time. Aerith pulled into the nearest open space in the staff lot and hurried them into the lobby, a wary eye on Kadaj like Myde might drop him at any moment. All right, so his hospital track record was admittedly clumsy…

"Belle," Aerith called toward the front desk, "ask Jane to meet us at the nurses' station, please."

They had already breezed past the front desk and were waiting for the elevator. "All right," Myde heard Belle's pleasant voice ring back to them; one of the secretary's hands flapped idly and dismissively over the partition, shooing them on. The lobby fell into that sort of clinical silence again, the distant air conditioner hum and someone coughing a ways off.

"Actually, Myde," Aerith said as the elevator doors slid open, "I'm glad you caught up with me. Before all this started, I was looking for you." Her voice had a strange note about it, almost evasive, even though she was the one bringing it up. She watched Kadaj rather than meeting his eye. "There's something I… wanted to give you." Her voice dropped even lower, like she thought someone might be listening though they were only ones in the elevator. The hesitancy that slowed the words woke his sleeping nerves, made his teeth chatter.

What did Aerith have to give him that she didn't want to talk about out loud?

It worried him, grated on his thoughts and pinged against the insides of his skull until he started to panic, worried maybe she was giving him a termination notice after all. That hesitating was just her way of trying to be nice about it! The possibilities multiplied and started to wage war in his head, and Myde was so far gone that he didn't even notice the elevator opening again—or Aerith getting out. She turned around, glancing back in confusion.

"Myde?"

He was jerked abruptly back into the moment, and leapt between the closing doors. "Sorry, sorry!" He tried to join Aerith where she stood in the hall, but the moment he took a step forward both he and his bundle of sleeping eight-year-old bumped straight into a man who'd been trotting up to the catch the elevator.

The man caught Myde by the elbows like he meant to steady the intern, but Myde hadn't been about to fall over, so he had to wonder if the guy wasn't trying to steady himself… "Whoops!" The man grinned, blue-green eyes crinkling at the corners. "Watch out there!" And Myde was pretty sure the guy _was_ talking to himself with that one, if his continued good humor was any indication.

Where… had Myde seen this guy before? Although he couldn't place it, there was something eerily familiar about his long brown hair, the slope of his jaw, even his build… It was ringing all sorts of bells in Myde's mind but nothing solid was coming in at all.

The man gazed over Myde's head, a look of disproportionate disappointment sweeping across his face when he realized he had indeed missed the elevator. "Guess I'll have to take the long way…" His words had the air of a soldier about to charge headlong into certain death. He stepped around Myde briskly (no looking back), tugged open the nearby door to the stairwell, and disappeared.

"Mr. Loire…" Aerith called, even holding out one hand like she'd meant to stop him. "Please watch your ste—"

A horrific bang and clatter echoed up the stairwell before she could even finish. Myde had no idea how Kadaj was still asleep. (Maybe he really was comatose.)

"It was just a few stairs!" the man's voice rang up the staircase. "I'm fine!"

Myde stared at Aerith. Aerith stared at Myde. "Shouldn't we um… go help him?" Myde tried to be charitable, although he wasn't sure how he'd help anyone with his hands so obviously full. Aerith took him by surprise again, shaking her head.

"I'm sure his caretakers aren't far behind," she sighed, turning away and starting down the hall. Sure enough, before they'd even gotten three steps forward, a dark-skinned man and… a giant… rounded the nearest corner. They paused, took one look at the open door to the stairwell and groaned. Well, the dark-skinned man groaned. The giant made some sort of noise which Myde could only describe as "…." but which got the exasperated sentiment across, nonetheless.

"You might want to hurry," Aerith offered the men, with an air of fond familiarity that made Myde wonder just how many times this exact same scene had played itself out in the halls of Rufus Memorial before he'd ever been around.

Free of further distraction, they continued on their way, finally reaching the nurses' station. Nurse Porter was fidgeting as she waited for them.

"Oh, _there_ you are," she remarked in that strange accent of hers. Any impatience or nerves was quickly washed away under worry when she spotted Kadaj. She gingerly plucked him from Myde's hold, leaning him against her chest like a mother ape might lean her baby. Laying the boy down on the patient's table, she inspected his fingers and _tsk_ed, shooting Myde a sideways glance like she suspected he was to blame. _Sheesh, everyone in this hospital is a mama bear…_

"Doesn't seem like stitches," Nurse Porter said at last, and some degree of tension that Myde hadn't even noticed went out of Aerith.

"That's good." Aerith's smile was genuine and untroubled for the first time that day. "I'd also like someone to be there when he wakes up. Is Lulu on call today?"

Already puttering about, pulling antiseptic and rolls of bandages out from a nearby cupboard, Jane paused for a moment, tapping her bottom lip with a slender finger. "I'll ring her when I'm through here."

"Thanks," Aerith said, and then it was just the two of them at last, alone with whatever secret Aerith wanted Myde to know but didn't want to tell him.

The walk to her office was excruciatingly quiet, the sound of Aerith's heels on the tile the only interrupting noise, rhythmically piercing like the increasing staccato of his heartbeat. She slid through the door into her office, inviting Myde with a gesture to take his usual seat beside her desk. He dropped into the chair heavily, all the strength going out of his legs, trying not to think of the chairs in interrogation rooms or worse, the electric kind—

Aerith pulled open the side drawer of her desk, the one reserved for all her most important files. Then she paused, meeting Myde's nervous gaze with an unnamable expression of her own. Reluctant maybe. Cautionary.

"What I'm about to do," she prefaced, "I'm not doing as a doctor. In some ways, I might be putting everyone's positions in danger by asking this of you… But as someone who cares about Ienzo and… about you too… I feel like I should give this to you. If anyone could understand its deepest meanings, I'm sure that person would be you, Myde."

"This" was a stack of thick, spiral-bound volumes, page after page covered in tidy, unflagging Courier New font. Aerith hefted them out of her drawer and slid them across the surface of her desk into his hands.

Through the clear sheet cover on the first volume, Myde read:

_I was Ienzo. I was Zexion. Now I am—_

Suspicion like bile rose in the back of his throat. "W-What is this?"

Aerith wove her fingers together just to have something to occupy her hands. "This is Ienzo's story, from start… to finish." Myde's stunned gaze tore from the books to rest on her, although she looked out across her office and into some other place entirely. "You were late this morning. I went to do morning greetings myself… When I found Ienzo, he told me it was done. That there was nothing else to say. That he wasn't ever… going to write again."

And by the time she'd finished speaking the suspicion had morphed into something hot and stabbing below his ribs, heat lightning rolling in his stomach; the sensation was so uncommon in him it took Myde a while to realize it was anger, righteous and razor-sharp.

"Does he know?" The cold undertow of his own voice distantly shocked him. "Does he know you did this?" The books burned in his hands like he was betraying Ienzo somehow just by holding them.

Aerith was momentarily taken-aback, but fear was not an honest part of her and certainly she wasn't going to back down from someone like Myde. "He knows," she declared, firm in that belief at the very least. "I've been reading it all along and he knows that too."

Did that make it better, somehow? Did that make it any less sneaky, any less thievery? If Ienzo had wanted Myde to know then wouldn't he have just told him—hadn't he told Myde everything he intended to? And although he'd also never told Myde not to read the words on the wall, these were… these were still secrets, still belonged to Ienzo alone—

"You know, Myde," Aerith murmured, contemplative, assuaging, "sometimes memories themselves are the hardest things for us to confront. We end up having to accept things we'd rather not, and remember things we'd rather forget… And always, we feel alone looking back, hunting for the places we went wrong and wishing someone would just tell us… wishing someone would just do the accepting for us…"

Myde thought of Kadaj. Myde thought of Kadaj in the graveyard, his face dirty and tear-streaked, pressing himself against the metal casing of his mother's body like he could breathe life back into her if he just stood close enough—and the way all hope had gone from his eyes when he knew the truth at last, when he looked back into his memories and remembered the billowing smoke drilled with bullet hole drops of the rain…

And Myde thought of Cloud, brimming with the ghosts of the dark past, free from everything except remembering and remembering constantly, thoughts like a jet black disease creeping through every vessel and vein—_was I wrong was I selfish why wasn't I loved why did I_—permanent as the ink under his skin, and maybe still after all this time, still a little in love, still worshipping the lingering traces…

Or Vincent, the last living artifact of a frozen world, peopled by recollections of the dead, all the hidden monsters of the universe lurking beneath the refuse of some earlier, simpler life…

Or his mother even, her hand half around his shoulders, afraid to let him go and afraid to hold him close because she had lost everything before and didn't think she could survive losing it all over again.

Ienzo's uncertainty. And in all of them, memories of the boy named Sora.

_True, we don't have hearts, but we remember what it was like. That's what makes us special. _

_Could it be that the heart is memory itself?_

Myde didn't have any answers. Myde didn't know what the heart was or where it came from or even how they could find it again. But when he thought about it, really thought about it, he was sure that memories made them who they were, made Cloud's suffering, Kadaj's grief, Myde's own confusion—and all that time ago, in the dream, when he said _it's a prison made from your memories_, Myde couldn't have become Demyx then because he hadn't remembered it, still hadn't remembered it all—

And maybe every feeling led back to a memory, a chain of memories: the way he felt certain things would work out when he looked at Ienzo might just be a product of the fact that everything _did_ work out, and the way he hated his father an echo of that first humiliation at twelve years old, crying in the lobby full of unsympathetic people…

Who would Aerith be, without her recollections of each patient, each struggle and each triumph? Or Ienzo, without his theories?

That would be true emptiness, wouldn't it?

So what did it mean to be a Nobody, full of two lifetimes of memories, good memories and bad, painful and perfect? To remember the way that bees made them shrink in them skin or the first time their hearts shivered to a pounding music? The thrill of success, the sharp bite of failure? What did it mean that they kept their bodies, sometimes even the same scars from childhood dares and lessons well-learned and all the same subtle distastes like Ienzo's dislike for cold floors? Why did they wear the black coats to protect themselves from Darkness when what Darkness corrupted was the heart? What did it mean that the sensation of _wanting_ never left them?

Memories were what made them different from the monstrous shells of the Dusks. What made them human.

Maybe somewhere in Ienzo's memories, Myde might even find his heart.

"All right," he surrendered, "I'll read it. All of it."

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Şίłνεŗ – Вūłłεŧ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

**1)** At this point, apologies have really become meaningless. _**The Violet Room**_** updates about once a year.** Right now, that's all me and DG can manage. Real life bites guys, but it's still my highest priority. For those of you are concerned that this fic is going to die, all I can point to is the fact that it's been more than four years and it isn't dead yet. In my profile, you can find an accurate word count for the upcoming chapters. I change this frequently, so you should be able to get some sense of when the next update will appear.

**2) Occasionally important sidenotes:** Yes, Sephiroth/Cloud was a canon relationship in this story/universe/whatever. But now it's not anymore. I swear I'm not trolling you guys. — By now you realize you're reading a prose poem, right? — Whenever I think of Demyx's hair, I think "moderne Vokuhila" but that has no good English equivalent. — _Only six more chapters to go!_

**3)** The awesome and wonderful **Grande Valse Brillan** has drawn an outstanding piece of fanart for _The Violet Room_, which I have, of course, linked in my profile! Go there, view the incredible, fine detail, and shower her with praise and adoration like I can't stop doing! Go go! :)

**4)** TVR now has its own **TV Tropes page**. I gushed about this in my profile too, so on your way to check out the nifty fanart, be sure to check this out also. I adore the TV Tropes website, and I would love to see the page grow, so if any of you are tropers, be sure to add your favorite bits of TVR!

**5)** **Trivia:** In the last chapter, the titles mentioned were _A Long Day's Journey Into Night_, _Intruder in the Dust_, and _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_. All wonderful books. Read them! **In this chapter:** Ienzo quotes and twists around lines from which poem by William Butler Yeats? And, later, Myde thinks a line about things "counting" which was inspired by a certain Joan Didion book—an essay collection with its own connections to W. B. Yeats. What was that book's title?

**Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alerts list!**


	10. Storm

_Please note: _

1) **This chapter is unbeta'd**. DG's real life is way too busy/amazing for me to bother her, so if anything seems glaringly wrong, it's my fault. Con crit is always appreciated.

2) If anybody feels like the rating for this fic should be **bumped to **_**M**_** for violence**, just let me know and I will be happy to change it.

3) If you have a real life, **don't try to read this in one sitting**. It's way the hell too long.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

and

_DistortedGaze_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħąρτεŕ IV_

Ғāηŧąŝίą – Đ ε ł – Şσġησ – ( Äηđąηŧε ) :

Şŧσŗм

This chapter is dedicated to TheOptimisticPessimist and Magentian.

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The creaking of the automatic garage door behind him was every horror movie soundtrack combined: the broken twig that gave away his hidden location, the unfortunate echo that drew the eyes of every zombie in the mall—at the very least, the way its slamming rang into the house betrayed him, and before the door was even shut behind Myde, his mother's voice was swimming out of her office.

"Come here, My'."

It was the same as every other day, the exact same words in the exact same tone he heard every time she got home before he did. It evoked a sense of déjà vu so strong it smoldered in one corner of his mind, slow-burning through years of identical memories: he came through the garage, ignored her warning, kicked his shoes off in the hall in that exact spot every day…

If he had been Myde still—just Myde, anyway—he would have tossed the shoes down right there and tromped dutifully into his mother's office, content enough to give her the same summary of his day that he'd given her for years.

"My day was fine," he'd say, or maybe air some meaningless complaint like being called on twice in class.

Instead, the transcription of Ienzo's writing burned where Myde's messenger bag touched his leg and the thought of speaking to his mother burned in the back of his throat. If he could only avoid her forever…

"Coming," he answered finally. Every step he took toward her seemed drawn out into a miniature eternity, yet long before he wanted to, Myde found himself leaning against the door frame, staring into his mother's office. Although all he could see was her.

"What have you done to your hair?" she breathed, the words wispy and betrayed. The haircut. Of course she'd be worried about that—he'd completely forgotten, left before she saw it that morning, and now she was staring at him like she'd seen a ghost, that same hesitant glint as if she wasn't sure she had the right person at all.

"I j-just… felt like… a change?" Myde mumbled, pulling at some of the longer strands at the base of his neck. He slid, hangdog, into the room and waited, tensing from head to toe, fully expecting her to devolve into put-upon sighing. Then she'd start with the lancing reminders about the need for _professional _appearance, which he would have no way to answer except by apologizing again…

But she didn't. She didn't chastise him. She didn't even sigh. She refused to look anywhere but the shock of gelled strands at the top of his head or the close-cropped sides, and he thought (with another twinge of that sinking, emptying sensation) that she was looking there as an excuse not to look at his face.

But maybe that suited Myde just fine? He wasn't comfortable with the thought of meeting her eyes either. He'd see something hurtful there, or give something away. She'd read it on his face most of all: the fleeting idea forming in the back of his mind to just take Ienzo and run—

"How was your day?" she said at last, so practiced the words seemed to lose all meaning, breaking over him in a rush of dull noise.

Only habit supplied him with a suitable answer. "One of the patients ran off today. When I caught up to him, I bumped into Cloud…" Myde muttered, watching the flow of blood in and out of his knuckles as he gripped the edge of his office chair.

"Cloud?" his mother repeated, colored with relief. Cloud, she knew—Cloud (she thought) was normal.

Well aware of all the implications, Myde said, "It's weird how you can know people for ages and still not know anything about them." He managed a limp shrug. "Everyone has secrets, I guess…" _Some almost as big as mine_. He laughed or almost, a quick exhalation that ruffled the towering stack of magazine proofs beside his seat.

Mariana didn't say anything; the silence afterward sat in the air like a solid thing. Myde read the titles of the articles at the top of the paper heap just to fill his head: _Adopting a Cause: Maid Marion's Touching Foster Care Mission_, _Fifty Weight-Busting Summer Sweets_, _Save Your Marriage in Seven Days_. This was his _mother's_ day, the ever-present slew of information to pick and choose from, articles covering the same dull topics over and over again, the same make-up ads just relabeled—and somehow all of it actually had merit to his mother, enough to keep her at her work year after year. It _meant_ something to her, the way the hospital did to him, and the way being a Nobody did, and the way Ienzo did.

Myde opened his mouth, determined for half second to tell her the _truth_ about his day, the things he had said and meant in the hospital garden, the story festering in his bag, the way it felt knowing he was not so damn alone on the planet—maybe she _should_ know that, that he wasn't the only one different—

_There's someone important to me_, he wanted to say. _There's someone_ like _me_.

But the words wouldn't form. What would she say if he tried? Would she interrupt him, or pretend he never said anything, or find some way to fit it back into "Myde," into the firm vision of normalcy she had for her child?

"Everything's fine," he said finally, to say something at all. It was the exact same thing he'd been saying since he started at Rufus Memorial. "Work's fun. I'm doing a good job." Sort of. Well, they hadn't fired him yet.

Mariana drummed her manicured nails over the cover samples for the next issue of _Destati_, perusing the smiling women and the strawberry cake displays with distant eyes. "That's—" she was on her way to saying "great" when the phone rang. Snatching up the receiver, she held out a hand to hush him although he hadn't been speaking.

"Hello? Yes?" She waited silently as the person on the other line spoke. A frown cut her face—or had it been there all along?—pulling down the corners of her lips until Myde could see where her coral shell lipstick was uneven, where the first fine lines of age were settling in. "I asked him to have that copy ready last week," she murmured, displeasure a sharp edge in her voice. "I know. Well..." A long silence. "Yes, that might be the best course. Why don't you—"

She was outlining some plan or other to get them back on track for publication; someone would pay for the delay somewhere down the road, but Myde couldn't find it in him to even fake interest. How many times had he heard the same conversation? If he tried hard enough, Myde thought he might be able to recite it by heart.

In the lull between her silence and the meaningless bell-chiming of her voice, Myde let his eyes wander the room. It felt oddly foreign to him and, with a jolt, he realized it _was_ foreign: sometime between his running away and coming back, the room had been rearranged. It was not just a simple rearrangement of one or two stacks of paper either. The pair of bookshelves that had crowded the wall on his left for as long as Myde could remember (probably as long as the shelves had been there then—they hadn't had furniture for the house until he was almost thirteen) had been moved to the opposite side of the room, and the magazines that had long clogged the shelves in haphazard stacks had been painstakingly organized by publisher... He squinted toward the closest copies. She'd organized by volume and issue too, it seemed.

Something caught and stuck in Myde's throat, growing into a solid lump that made it harder to breathe by the second. His stomach lurched.

No one but he and his mother were allowed in her office. Their maid wasn't even allowed in, for fear of misplacing the one back issue or article query necessary to make or break Dawn City's most famous women's glossy.

If the room had been rearranged, Mariana had done it herself. And if there was one thing he knew about his mother, it was that she did _not_ change.

The tossing and turning of his stomach only grew the more he looked around: the antique red and purple rug was finally gone. His mother had bought it years ago at the estate sale of some celebrity or another, the _first_ piece of finery for the house that cost his mother so much they slept on the floors for six months.

He'd slept on that rug even, dreamed it would take off and fly him into some harrowing adventure. He'd marveled at the unfamiliar feeling of real carpet fibers beneath his outstretched hands for weeks. When the shelters had carpet, it had always been thin and rough as pasteboard, covered with unavoidable stains from years of use. He'd known the smooth chill old linoleum so well that anything else felt odd and wonderful.

Which was probably why his mother had loved that rug, cherished it long after it grew worn and dingy. Hidden in her office, it never had to match the spotless carpets from the rest of the house, the ones torn out as soon as a careless guest flecked them with wine or Myde tracked in another clod of dirt too persistent to bleach out. Tucked away, the rug in her office was never called upon to exceed expectations, and for that reason alone, Myde thought it would stay in the house forever—might be the one thing to keep his mother's affections when the day came that he inevitably let her down.

Except that day had come, and while Myde was still in the house, the carpet had vanished.

What had she done for the whole day between the incident in the kitchen and his teary-eyed return?

Because it had to have taken that long. The desk was in a different place too, and on the desk, her computer had switched sides, all the papers had been reorganized into far neater stacks and a set of paperweights he never seen before had been put into use. The very edge of the desk's far corner was taken up by a potted fern, so fresh-looking Myde knew she'd bought it the day before. Her long series of filing cabinets had been shifted to fill the bookshelves' old place, and she seemed to have added a pair of cabinets or so. Myde knew just how full those files were, and wondered for a minute how she had ever managed to move them herself—she must have taken every folder out, one-by-one, and then put them all back just as meticulously.

Even the pictures hanging on the walls were different. Like the carpet, the old waterlilies piece on the far wall was gone. It had been a gift from a museum to which _Destati_ gave generous yearly donations, and the new picture—some clash of color and geometric patterns which looked like disjointed foxes—probably came from the same source. It was a much smaller painting; the back wall looked a little barren.

To make up for that, his high school diploma had been moved from the side wall to the back, along with several of the awards his mother had received over her long years as the magazine's enormously successful chief editor.

In place of these, on the right wall Mariana had found room for photos Myde had long forgotten: their first trip to Seven Flags Over DC, where he'd been too afraid to ride anything; the Mother's Day he'd gotten up early and almost set their closet-sized apartment on fire trying to make his mother pancakes; his first performance with the high school jazz band. And—

And _what_ was that?

Dead center in the middle of the nearest wall was the framed cover of a magazine. It was an old, old issue of _Destati_, slightly discolored. Even the frame it sat in seemed to spring out of a different time, the glass a little cloudy, the wood well-worn. But despite the years and fade between them, there was no mistaking the cobalt shade of those eyes, the blue-steel hair in that photo.

Framed on his mother's rearranged wall was a magazine cover of Ienzo.

He looked young—ten maybe, or eleven—and he was stuck between two people who could only be his parents, judging by the woman's blue hair and the superior cant to the man's face which was eerily familiar to Myde. He'd seen that same vaguely condescending head tilt on Ienzo a hundred times.

But what he noticed most were the smiles. _That_ look was one Myde had _never_ seen on Ienzo's face and one he doubted he would ever see again: in the photo, Ienzo grinned from ear to ear, his eyes alight even on the faded page. He looked, for all the world, like a young boy who was the happiest he'd ever been. He was holding up an enormous golden cup, and if Myde squinted, he could make out the words "National Spelling Bee" engraved on it.

A long shudder crawled its way down Myde's spine. He realized, with an acute knifing pain between his lungs, that this was Ienzo _before_—before he had remembered anything really, before he had ever_ thought_ the name Zexion, or wondered about the origins of emotions... when he was _just_ Ienzo, the brilliant child of a politician and an heiress, living a life so charmed it would have made Myde seethe at ten years old, when he and his mother were shuffling between low-income family centers and collecting cans on weekends, keeping change in an olive jar.

He knew better now. He knew, theoretically, what happened just after this photo. Ienzo had answered when Myde worked up the stuttering courage to ask.

_Torn Apart_, the headline blared. _How a Mysterious Mental Illness Destroyed the Perfect Family_.

Except that was not quite the way it looked. The grave lines of the older man's face stood out darkly to Myde, who saw beneath the projection of strength exactly what he found in Ienzo from time to time: cavernous ambition, swallowing anything in its path. The man looked as if he had never been satisfied with anything in his entire life. And the woman's hands around Ienzo's shoulders—not flawless so much as unworked—her demure smile, the almost surprised look in her eyes all whispered something like _helplessness_, the debilitating sensation of having everything laid out and decided for you, which Myde himself knew all too well.

Neither one of them would ever have been able to reach Ienzo, to find him when the fierce gale of old memories shook his eleven-year-old identity to pieces and didn't bother to put it back together again.

Maybe, like his own mother, all any normal person could do in the face of the endless void (the alien differences, the dire needs of Nobodies) was grasp at straws. Call out for their before-monster children.

"What... is this?" he mused to himself, because it occurred to him then, sure and solid, that there were no coincidences in this particular world.

His mother had kept a framed picture of Ienzo for years. From all the thousands of worlds and millions of people, _Myde _had found the remnants of the remnants, Zexion or Ienzo or both. His soul or whatever little bit it was that lasted had been drawn somehow to one familiar glimmer and refused to let it go.

Myde was jerked out of his rambling thoughts by his mother's voice. Her phone call had ended, and now she turned to stare at the framed cover too.

"That," she said, "was the first feature article I ever wrote." It took Myde a moment to realize she was answering his self-directed question. Her scowl evened out as she looked at the picture, not blank but certainly unreadable. "I was office help at the time, do you remember?"

Vaguely he did. She'd loved the job because it was a _paying_ job, and even if she swayed on her feet when she got off the bus home every night, it paid enough to finally get them a place, a real place, small as it was. But she'd hit the ceiling fast, he remembered that too. She didn't have the job experience to move up the ladder, no matter how much she'd tried to make up for it with devotion. Every day she'd made him pray for a promotion.

"It was just luck in the end," she murmured, sliding her hand across the rich, dark wood of her desk, just one more sign of hard work ultimately well-rewarded. "Cruella was giving Anita Radcliffe such a hard time about her new puppies she begged that day off and left me in the office with the witch. When we got the tip-off that the press might be allowed interviews, Cruella sent me on the drop of a hat."

He hadn't known any of this. Or maybe he had, somewhere deep down in his memory? All that mattered to him back then was the fact that he suddenly had the money to buy school lunches and go on the field trips and she even, on occasion, took him out for ice cream.

"That edition of the magazine sold a record number. For a while it looked like Amaryllis was going to take over as governor; the trial with his son became a huge media scandal—and I was the only one who got a single word out of that boy through the whole thing."

The indecipherable expression on her face opened up into something Myde could understand, but he didn't like what he found. She stared far off, back into some memory he'd never have, and her jaw clenched so tightly Myde worried she'd crack her teeth gritting them.

When she spoke again after a long pause, it was in a bare whisper Myde had to lean to catch. "In my entire life, I have never been frightened of anything as much as that boy. He was just a little older than you, just as small... But when I met his eyes, it was like staring into a black hole. No remorse. No fear. No sadness. There was absolutely _nothing_ inside him."

_There's someone important to me_. _There's someone_ like _me_.

Myde couldn't control what happened next. He hardly _knew_ what was happening. In an enormous spray the nearest stack of papers exploded outward across the floor, because his _hand_ had swung out to knock them over. He stood so violently the office chair fell onto the floor too, wheels clattering and tangling in the papers.

Her new office plant went the same way as the mountain of articles when he swept it onto the ground. The ceramic pot shattered; shards shot across the floor and dirt like gunshot residue radiated far outward into the room. He shoved her computer monitor over so that nothing separated them, and from somewhere deep inside him came a cold voice as venomous as an adder.

"What would you know? You've never,_ ever_ had to feel that kind of _empty_. You don't have _any_ clue what it's like. Don't pretend you know him because you got _one_ look. You don't even know me and you call yourself my mother."

The words had a nasty echo; the discordant jangling of the room's water vapor in the back of his mind crashed against the heaving of his breath through his nose. He sealed his mouth sharply, half afraid if he left his lips open even a little, he'd vent some more poison into the air between the two of them.

Mariana stared at him, devoid of coherent thought. He had never acted like that. Not in his terrible twos, not when he was sixteen and sure the world was ending, not even when she had told him to change his music major. He had never purposefully destroyed anything.

Myde saw it the moment the shock wore off and turned into a flicker of fear. She hid it well but it was still there, lurking in the corners of her head: Mariana Cistern was certain she did not know the man standing in front of her. He was something irrevocably outside the realm of her control.

He saw it finally begin to dawn on her too, breaking at last through some of the vicious walls she had thrown up to protect herself from the realization: the oblivious Myde she had named and warred and suffered to raise was already dead and gone. Small changes in this office couldn't be bartered as concessions to avoid that fate. Nothing would ever be the same for her again.

"I'm sorry," he said. For everything. His hands shook. He hadn't meant to do this; he hadn't meant to ruin her work or her things, but he'd just felt...

He'd just felt. Anger. Hurt. Betrayal. Confusion. Fear. All of it.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. He wasn't supposed to be like this.

Mariana looked down at the back of her computer monitor. "Maybe you should just go," she said at last.

"M-Maybe I should," he agreed, although she meant _to his room_ and he meant _somewhere else_ _entirely_.

Myde turned and left the room without another sound or stutter, shutting the door behind him for the first time in his entire life.

On his shoulder the messenger bag felt like a titanic weight, the final cut script for an imminent apocalypse. His trudge up the stairs seemed to take forever. He wanted to read Ienzo's story and he didn't want to—what he wanted was answers and he knew he wouldn't find them, still couldn't help hoping... hoping at least that Ienzo would tell him _how_ they could _hope_ in the first place.

But all he would find were more questions, riddles even the genius couldn't solve. Earlier that day he'd been all right with that, had told Ienzo it was okay not to know...

Now he wasn't so certain. Now he was afraid he'd wade into the fountain of Ienzo's darkest memories and drown.

The sound of his bedroom door shutting was a reveille to an execution. He was hyper-sensitive to the sensation of discarded clothes brushing up against his socks and ankles, to the feeling of his comforter against his elbows as he slid across his bed, to the weight of the bound books in his palms, their plastic covers sticking to his fingers and their spiral binding pressing new prints into his skin.

He hefted the first two volumes out of his bag as he settled back against his pillows, preparing for what would inevitably be a long night. His whole arms trembled when he peeled the first transparent cover back. Skimming the words, his eyes darted down the opening page until he found the first thing he hadn't heard before, and that was where he began.

_I was eight years old when I killed my father_.

It was going to be a very, very long night.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

He cuts dark shapes through the frost on the inside of the window pane with a fingernail _the modern representation of a star begins at _but he pauses in the middle to clean out the churned ice from beneath his nail. The calligraphic path is an outlet to which he presses one eye, breath alternately reobscuring and waning to pinprick beads of condensation. Outside the snow is falling even now. Outside the snow is even now a white rag at all their mouths muffling, at their eyes blurring, the refracted navy of the night sky and night shadows diffused to a singular, swirling shroud of gray.

Far away something in its depths is moving.

His father is still not home.

Ienzo's hand (too small at this point to be anything but comically fragile, he knows) frets the twine of his Midnight Anklet as many times as seconds on a wound clock, the worn black fiber fitting into long-callused grooves for which he has already been scolded, the arrow sharp charms twanging out a crystalline tune by now so familiar his tongue can almost mimic.

_ It's a ward against Darkness_.

Outside is a white sort of darkness and no one around but through the momentary scratch marks he makes in the window frost Ienzo can watch indistinct figures shifting and pawing in the storm: a fanged maw opening, a spine bent in all non-Euclidean directions at once. A siege line of indecipherable monster bodies. All of them coming closer. He shuts his eyes but the image doesn't change at all. Anyway the snow was falling behind his eyelids all along.

Somewhere a grandfather clock is chiming but they've never owned one of those and in the hearth a fire is burning only it _isn't_, hasn't been lit today. That doesn't change the orange light on the corners of the furniture raising shadows which flicker of their own accord.

Trying to empty himself out again, Ienzo rests the small white edge of his teeth on top of one knee, worrying a fold of his handmade trousers. Then his face is more than half buried in his legs, one blue eye the only thing left open to the world. Over the silencing effect of the blizzard, there is the sound of fleshy dragging, eager rumbling calls. His father is late which means outside somewhere in the storm's eye teeming with teeth and tongues and throats, the dogs with the tentacle spines following the scent trails of his footprints in the ice…

On the floor of their silent living room, the shadows raised by the fire in the unlit hearth writhe and wriggle into impossible geometric figures, nonagons and seven-pointed stars and parabolic rises which deny the hard angles of the room and wash the whole place over in the creeping sensation of bad-dreaming_ the center will form a normal pentagon with five identical angles each measuring_. Nothing unusual. Anymore.

A stew pot in the kitchen is thrown down on the counter with a shattering _clang_ like the old bells of the castle chapel in the wind. He buries his whole face in his knees, and "Stop," his mother says in the other room, not a demand but a plea too exhausted and familiar to even be desperate anymore. "Stop." The sound of her voice in the echoing tremble of the cooking pot might as well be the skittering of a pebble before a glacier, but she's his mother and good mothers try.

Her eyes are playing tricks on her. Like always. Or his are.

The walls of the house begin to melt, the window glass liquefying like fat beads of sweat. The eaves begin to drip, and the ceiling bows and sags down around Ienzo in streams of rich, pulled candy. The roof opens up; the wooden floor begins to drip outward, a river through every crevice and mouse hole. In the kitchen, his mother doesn't so much as shriek, doesn't so much as move, even when the snow begins to drift in through the great open space where their roof had been—even when the sloshing remnants of the stone countertops stick her skirts to her ankles and she watches every precious, important, special, and expensive belonging they have to their names turn into crystal clear elixir and drain out into the frostbitten street.

The winter wind shakes her hair, that waterfall of pure blue tied high up on her head. She doesn't lift a hand to brush it clear of her face. Her fingers stay resolute, curled around the handle of a kitchen knife that has long since run out between her fingers, and her other hand never flinches, pressed into the outline of a cutting board that no longer exists. She even carries the motions through, continues to chop idly at some carrot or onion no one can see anymore.

Where he stares over his knees, Ienzo can see that the window seat he's been perched on has disappeared as completely as the lacquered wood paneling of the floor. His bare feet and fingers, white and questing, balance on thin air. But he never begins to fall. He doesn't expect to—though it might be nice, the wall of snow enough maybe to shield him from the hunchbacked wolves, from the new thing approaching tonight which even through the storm he can see has nine eyes and no nostrils.

His father enters at last through a door which had not been there a moment before, which had never been exactly there anyway, splitting the sitting room bookcase in two so that the first thirteen volumes of their encyclopedia set go one way and the last thirteen the other. The door his father enters through is warped and stained green by age, not paint; Ienzo thinks their real front door is a clean, demure shade of eggshell, but by now he might be mistaken.

"I'm home," Ienzo's father says.

And "Welcome home," Ienzo answers. There _is_ a house again, and this time it is mostly right. Against the front window, the hot breath of a monster with a man's hair but a spider's mouth doubles the opaque frost.

Dutifully, Ienzo unfolds, slipping from the window seat and picking his way across the frozen floorboards. He doesn't bother to rearrange his face—couldn't name the expression on it at the moment even with the aid of a mirror. He couldn't even say for certain if what he'd see in the mirror would match his actual reflection. "How was your work, Father?"

But the man is already half way across the room, unraveling his knit scarf and loosening the upper buttons on his bridge coat. For a moment the buttons look like they should: six frosted golden discs, imprinted with some indistinguishable isometric pattern—but then the loosened set nearest to his father's neck untwines, spiraling out into two jointed millipede bodies, thousands of golden thread-thin legs wriggling them upward toward the hollows of his father's ears.

There is a sound like water and stones rolling in a glass bottle when the millipede closest to Ienzo begins to worm its way into his father's right ear, its exposed body belling impossibly out to collapse into the narrowed space; somewhere very close to Ienzo's own ear, a husky, old voice begins to talk about songs that never leave one's head, a few tuneless bars of a melody Ienzo has never heard drifting through the down hairs where his skull meets his neck.

Ienzo bites the very tip of his tongue until there is no sensation left in it, until it transforms into something which feels like a dragonfly beating against the inside of his lips. By this time, his mother has smoke-wisped her way from the kitchen and stands dwarfed in the high doorway, the dicing knife returned to her hand less an off note than a momentary, solid presence on which to hang her own knife-thin body.

"I'm home," Ienzo's father repeats, stopped for some reason in the middle of unbuttoning his coat. Melting snow drips from his boots, and the drops shrug off their polarity and go skittering away from each other to hide in the unlit corners of the room.

His mother's gaze darts between Ienzo's and his father's with an old question folding up in the creased corners of her eyes, which makes his father stand straighter still and finally shrug off the coat, crossing to hang it on the hook near the hearth with steps as stiff and efficient as a SOLDIER's. In a voice to match, not bothering to look over his shoulder, he demands, "Is dinner ready?"

Her eyes meet Ienzo's again. One of her irises turns from gray to blue and back again. Both eyes shiver almost imperceptibly in their sockets.

"It will be on the table in a minute," she replies finally, gesturing to the dining room without looking away from her son.

His father exhales loudly, just once, through his nose, the sort of measured scoff which inevitably implies disappointment but never exactly at what—whether at the surreptitious stare Ienzo's mother is throwing around the room or the fact he will have to wait a few bare seconds for the evening meal to arrive, Ienzo cannot decide. The resulting displeasure is always the same.

Ienzo ghosts along in his father's wake, able to match his own miniature stride exactly to the taller man's because sometime between arriving and undoing the fourth button, his father's footsteps started to glow, the custom indentations on the boots' leather soles leaving bioluminescent silhouettes in their wake which spill out in liquid-looking clouds of micro-lights all over their once pristine wooden floorboards.

Ienzo moves from boot print to boot print, tracing his father's direct and unerring path to the dining room. Everywhere his feet touch within his father's footprints the inexplicable light is extinguished, creating miniature carvings in the sturdy shapes not unlike the ancient etchings down outside the city gates, the haloed handprints and the nameless, featureless figures. Silent as, Ienzo slips through the doorway toe to heel with his father, not even his bare feet squeaking on the wooden floor, and when the older man takes his seat at the head of the table, Ienzo struggles to pull back the heavy and ornate chair directly to the right.

He is never quite able to make purchase on it, somehow the grooves of the grapes and roses carved into its backing either too narrow or too broad to suit his child's fingers, the cushion smoothed and slick from his mother's nervous habit of perpetual upkeep. Finally he pushes it far enough from the edge of the table to hoist himself into it, one knee crawling over the seat's edge, and then neither of his feet anywhere near to touching the floor.

From under the shock of bangs hiding half his face, Ienzo stares, searching, at his father, hoping for something like eye contact. The man makes nothing approaching the gesture, surveys the bone china plate before him with a disapproving eye, as if he can see a square inch of it buffed slightly less than the rest. Then his father looks up to the doorway which Ienzo's mother still has not entered through and leaves his gaze there, waiting.

Knowing he still will not be noticed or scolded, Ienzo tucks both of his feet up underneath him, his bare toes freezing even through his trousers.

There are two plates on the table and two sets of silverware. But when his mother finally brings the last side dish in, there is another plate tucked hidden underneath it. When she reaches the massive table and leans over her own seat—her own plate and fork and knife—the illusion crumbles, and watching Ienzo's father from the corner of her eye, she leans a little further, separating the clean dinner plate from the hot dish and placing it in the empty space directly before Ienzo.

His father's mouth compresses into a single, grave line. Ienzo's plate is not on the table for a whole second before he says, "How long will you continue this charade?"

Ienzo's mother flinches, shivers visibly. The plate is retracted, pressed close up against her chest.

"You cannot keep acting this way. There will be _talk_ in town."

His mother does not say anything immediately, whips her head around in short, seizing shakes. "It's not…" she manages and then halts. "It's not a charade." Her voice is the half whisper, half rasp of the long-suffering ill, a hand fan churned only once in the midst of a humid, sweltering parlor.

In comparison, his father's voice is like a steel sword drawn straight from the fire, burning by proximity alone. "Dahlia," he says, "the boy has been dead half a year."

His mother's eyes roll white and enormous in their sockets, shaking her head again so the cascade of her hair lashes the space behind her and her clenching fingers turn as white as the plate they clutch. What she wants to say is _No no he is here I can see him I can still see him I must still feed him because he is here and alive and you you _you_ are the one who is wrong_ but even as she thinks it Ienzo lifts his hand to his face and stares straight at her through a near transparent palm.

What she says is "He's real." Or something like it.

What his father says is "He's not." Which might also be true.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The first snow of the season is a soft, warm snow, with enormous flakes which whirl through the air but melt before they ever reach the ground, so the street lamps grow haloes but no ice gathers up in the perilous cracks between the cobblestones. His laughing breeds a traveling cloud of fog, and Ienzo skips between one large stone and another, the brand new Midnight Anklet a foreign and unfamiliar but not unwelcome presence inside his left snow boot. Every time he lifts his foot, the dull points of the charms press into his ankle, not a pain so much as a perpetual reminder; every time he drops his foot, the new, stiff twine catches on the sock above his heel.

Even hidden by boots and the leg of his pants, the Midnight Anklet seems to exude its own dark light, a real presence as much as a mental one. He hasn't had it long enough to prove anything but the quality of its design, yet still there's something comforting about the cool weight of it, like trying on a parent's shoes and feeling certain of one's own future—or like his mother accompanies him even now, the tap of his heels on the stonework echoing out into the tapping of her steps, always light and humorous when they are alone.

But he is actually alone at the moment, of course, crossing Sector 7 on his way home from the tutor's the way he has now for the long two years between five and seven, since he first learned to navigate their section of the city, first learned not to share the contents of his lessons with every other passerby, no matter how interested they looked. Not that the back road route he's figured out has too many passerby, even on temperate, shining days.

Today, the light snow chases the streets clear entirely, moves the few milling ladies and the men in wool peacoats (who linger perpetually in the doorways of the pubs) finally inside, so that this winter seems to possess not only an obscuring but a silencing effect, a press of down or cotton in his ears. The street becomes a great distance across which all noises, even the nearby press of his boots on the stones, come muffled, late, and ghostly.

Belatedly, it feels a little lonesome, a little eerie.

His pace increases to something like a hopping step, the sensation of numbness creeping up his legs and in his mittened hands making him feel unnaturally sluggish, a confounding assault on his senses: his nose runs; his field of vision narrows.

The quiet on his walk home quickly becomes oppressive, and he wishes there were snow on the ground so he could make noise moving through it. To fill the air, he recites today's lesson with a heavy, half-frozen tongue, recalling measurements with impeccable clarity, even for himself.

"The sum of the angles of the regular pentagon at the center of a five-pointed star polygon is 540°. Each of the pentagon's five angles thus measures 108°. If the sum of degrees in any straight line is a given 180°, and the total number of degrees of the corresponding pentagon angle is 108°, the degree measurement for Angle A totals?"

The feeling of eyes on his back crawls down his body like bathwater left to chill, like his mother's hands in the dark on a feverish night when his whole head whirls the world around one central point of impossible focus—only the reassuring "Ssh, ssh" never comes, and when he finishes his math question, the answer falls from his mouth like a vein of heavy metals enough to crack the stone beneath him. The sound of his voice seems to lay there, an invisible, dead thing in the street.

"Seventy-two," he says, and finds he is trapped, the frog reflected in the eyes of the adder.

There is a brutal, animal sound from somewhere he is not looking, a low-thunder _growling_ that makes Ienzo's gut clench beneath his skin, makes one quarter of his heart try to climb into the others, hide inside them like that might keep it safe from whatever abomination he hears but can not see.

Something inside of him disengages from his body, shrivels and leaves him feeling as if all his nerves have died at once or something else has entered him and assumed their command. He is reduced to a shivering, screaming ghost inside his own head _runrunrun_ without even needing to know _what_ is lurking just outside the blurring tunnel of his vision, violent and starved.

He has no control over his body then, but his head turns anyway, mechanical and slow, and when the black rim of blood rush clears from his eyes, he stares across into the shadowed edges of an intersecting alley, where a pair of pupilless, jaundice eyes reflect light out of the darkness.

The monster releases another sandpaper snarl that slinks along the stone walls of the alley and over the road until it seems to strike Ienzo like a promise to spill him inside out across the snow, fangs already anticipating the first touch. His knees give out beneath him in a sluggish fall that scrapes them raw on the stones, but he doesn't feel it really—

The monster, barrel chest near dragging in the ice, slides out of the alley toward him, each creeping click of its claws against the ground an extension of the easy rolling of its corded muscle, whip-like and wire tight. Its fur is nothing more than a sleek, skin-close red velvet sheath. It is a dog and a panther all at once, heavy-shouldered, long-legged—its skin clings to its spinal column and pelvis so closely Ienzo can count every furrow in its bones, every sinuous shifting of its vertebrae. And the wild cat's mouth is blood red, opening wider and wider before him until every yellowed fang is bared, the canines long as crescent moons.

Over its back, a single worming thread of flesh like a tail or tentacle or the elongated, clothed stem of its brain bursts from the back of its skull to sway and writhe in the air.

It is no natural creature, like nothing he has ever seen or should have ever been made to see and only the rotting, sweet vomit and garbage smell of it rolling over him makes him believe it is real.

Everything inside him aches, beats against his ribs and head to the endless mantra of _runrunrunrun_ but nothing works properly. He can't even lift his hands to be some flimsy guard around his face. He isn't good at running. He will not get away.

At a little beyond seven years old, Ienzo Amaryllis comes to the immutable realization that he is going to die.

Everything shuts down. The white tinged world dissolves around him, and all there is endless blackness.

Somewhere in the infinite space is an unfamiliar chiming. Something inside him stirs, in all the places around his heart, expanding: invisible waves of sound from a glass bell, rippling out and out. It spreads under his ribs, he feels (but does not see), until there is no room for air in his lungs, until his heart beats like an insect in a close, clear jar, and there is no change in the world but somehow it seems to shiver, all over convulsing on him.

A faint smell drifts through his muted senses on an evening wind (which does not exist) like cooking smoke from a far-off stove, warm and sooty, mixed with an underlying breath of heavy night-blooming flowers, the tender vines unfurling in watery circles of moonlight, and the presence of old trees and hot, dark earth. He is a thousand years away from winter, backward into the last stifling August night, when he sat, palms pressed to the heated stone in the public gardens, the fountains still, the air too thick to breathe—when the only thing that moved were the fireflies over the mirror black lake and the hands of the castle clock high overhead…

_ It will protect you_, his mother's voice still saying.

All of the dark is warm, untouchable—yes, why not? Why not be here instead, safe inside a dream forever?

But he comes back to himself in degrees except no time has passed really and he doesn't come all the way back. The world has shifted sideways, reduced to road and towering vertical lines, snowflakes pinpricking the open expanse of his face. But the impulse to blink never comes, and he doesn't see or feel so much as register, slowly, that the monster is circling closer and closer. His uncovered eye is pressed almost to the frozen ground in line with its silvery claws, appearing from the sheaths of its toes and then withdrawing, nearer each time.

Poised to leap, the monster's head lowers, and the rolling frost of its breath washes over his skin, the last exuded liquid traces of corpse gasping, the inner meats gone slick and rancid, hot and sickly sweet: a dead thing smell, opening and opening.

But there is a cold, electric tingling beneath every inch of his unmoving skin.

"You don't see me," he says, thick and slow and divested from his body, thoughts safe a thousand miles away, ringed by a dark rope, by the deep glass beads cold and firm against his ankle—

_ Inside a fantasy._

"I'm not here."

_ It's a ward against darkness._

"You don't see me," he says again. And again. Every nerve worm-crawls under his skin.

The monster jerks, two swift steps backward and to the side simultaneously, fangs disappearing behind the wet folds of its lips as it draws in an enormous, searching sniff. Then it takes another step back. Ienzo feels faint, struggling inside the confines of his own skull to stay awake, to keep whispering his momentary mantra.

The beast begins to circle the area where he lies, its muzzle low to the stone, heaving in scents. The whip cord of its exposed brain stem thrashes and splits the air. A high, disturbed keening radiates from it, and it snaps forward without warning to swipe at the ground where he lies but its aim is off, a hair's breadth too far from his face to make contact. It dances backward again, dismayed and uncomprehending.

Then a shattering, metallic bellow tolls through the air and shivers the cobblestone beneath his cheek: at the heart of the Garden, all the castle's deep bells chime the half hour. The rolling sound carries on low frequencies even through the muffling snow, and—already unsettled but by what and how Ienzo doesn't know—the monster scrabbles, claws catching in the grooves between the paving stones. In bounds so fluid and frantic he cannot count or follow them, it vanishes, the spear end of the blood red tentacle lashing out behind it like a banner as it disappears between two indistinguishable buildings.

Ienzo breathes one short, stunned breath and discovers he probably has not been breathing much at all in the prior minutes. His head spins; the needling shocks to his nerves start to die off but leave a bone-deep weariness in their place, so much that even the task of sitting up seems incomprehensible.

He is alive. For long minutes after the monster has gone he doesn't dare to shiver, even to blink, and then from one street over or another someone calls out cheerfully and he remembers that the world is turning and the best course of action is probably not to be waiting for the beast to get over its fear and come back.

It takes a painful eternity to force his small body upright again, but the necessity of focus keeps him from thinking too deeply on the pressing question of why, exactly, the monster did not tear him limb from limb—and so he only discovers the truth after he is righted and breathing and he lifts one shivering hand to clear the melted snow from his face.

Where his mitten and hand should be, there is nothing. Where his too-long sleeve should be, there is nothing.

He feels his arm is there but cannot see it. He presses his wool-wrapped fingers close against his face, curling his hand into a hook to tangle in his bangs and still nothing, still just the dull white snow falling where he knows the fold of his arm should block all sight.

He doesn't want to look down but does anyway, and finds that even though he feels them, his legs tucked weakly underneath him are just gone, invisible or nowhere really.

Where Ienzo should be there is nothing but nothing.

That is when he finally starts to cry.

He isn't conscious of the stumbling journey home, just thinks of himself in the horrible place and then not, and he stares at the soft, eggshell beams of their front door a long time before he realizes he is not staggering forward anymore on invisible legs. His forehead falls heavily against the door, grating on the splintery planks, and he pounds one unseen, miniature mittened fist just under the wide brass handle. A string of noises half-garbled and half-wailed escape from him unbidden but he can't tell if they're coming out screams or murmurs.

Then the door falls open, and only his mother's hands (still damp from the washing maybe) keep him from crashing to the floor—but he doesn't discover this until later, because by now, the world is falling apart in degrees and adjacent angles, washed over in a devastating cacophony of dizzying colors that whirl and shiver inside his head and none of that relents until all he can see is blue, until he is surrounded by the warm, flowery smell of the fountains on an August night: still water and waterlilies.

His mother is wrapped around him, pressing his chilled face into her hair, her arms somewhere around his back like a final bastion, saying far away, "Ienzo, what happened? What's wrong?"

"You can see me?" he asks, his own voice more distant still.

"What are you talking about? How did you skin your knees?"

He'd forgotten about that. Can't feel it even when he tries. "I don't know," he answers which is nowhere near sufficient, but before his mother can say so he makes his resonant, tiny voice add, "Mother, have you ever seen a monster?"

"No," she replies, looking for the punchline in the words because her son is nothing if not stone cold practical and never once believed in monsters under the bed. "No," she repeats. "There hasn't been a single monster in the whole world since the Sorceress War, and that was a very, very long time ago."

She carries him inside their house. Ienzo wonders which parts, of any of this, are true.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"I can't take any more." His father's fist punctuates the words with ringing knocks against the wooden arm of the divan downstairs.

"I'm sorry." His mother apologizes for the hundred thousandth time.

Ienzo curls next to the heating duct in his room, listening to his parents' voices drifting directly up the chimney through the vents into his room. No one is mad, exactly, but every word that is added is another needling scalpel beneath his skin. Even as the heat of the fire in the hearth below begins to burn through his warm summer pajamas, Ienzo stays frozen in place, head almost pressed to the hot iron grating.

"A few misplaced books and fake puzzles in the way are one thing, Dahlia, but we can't even look out the Hyne-damned windows anymore without seeing—"

Here Ienzo imagines some vicious, cutting sweep of his father's hand to the wide front window, which all his life before has shown the winding, cozy lane of brick houses that dead-ends at their home, at the top of the bare incline, looking out over the roofs of the others—the front window which, for the last few months has intermittently shown what is really there and things which really _aren't_, and now is showing only the latter, a rapid fire, moving picture album of places Ienzo never even meant to imagine.

Reluctantly, Ienzo cranes his neck up to look out his own bedroom window, where instead of the distant peaks of the castle he sees steamy, swamp-like jungle with moss dangling hundreds of feet downward from the tree canopy so vivid green it hurts his eyes, all of it laced over and under by thousands of climbing vines. In the dark river that ambles its way through the scene, a large, sleek brown body breaks the surface, chirping and rolling this way and that in the water.

Ienzo doesn't know if this is what his parents are seeing downstairs, but it is wrong and that is good enough to merit their complaints. He screws his eyes shut, clenching so hard it seems the furrowing of his brow might impact his whole face, and through the dull discomfort of that he thinks _Go away. Just go away. Let me go._

Ienzo knows he is to blame for the windows, for everything else before and after and up to: the mirrors which reflect inhuman faces, the food in the cold locker turning into serpents spitting smoke and black acid in his mother's face every time she opens the door. It never really stings her but nevertheless makes her face appear to melt downward into her hands, makes her vision go dark for uncountable stretches of time. He is to blame for the inexplicable movement of their furniture too, everything changing so one moment his father is in the living room reading on the divan and the next moment he is haphazardly held up by the hallway banister, forcing itself into the space where he normally might stretch. That and the preternatural knocking, the whispered voices of an unseen, milling crowd, swishing dresses and dapper heels on the boards of their floor but no one there, never anyone there but his father and his mother, forced to listen.

And the monsters, of course. He's brought to life every grotesque, unearthly shape and combination of creature, lurking in the blurred corners of their eyes or slinking up directly to scratch at the door—they've never bitten yet but still the fangs are present and still the thought that one day he will go outside again and the monsters will not be dreamed up but _real_, real with the dead scent in their mouths and nothing between him and the crescent slivers of their teeth…

He knows all the ones they see are from his imagination, but that doesn't teach him to stop them—doesn't even tell him how to pick and choose, so that if he has to see something that isn't _real_, at least he could make it always pleasant—so he could choose just the sweet dreams, and leave out the birds with the syringe bills built for vampire feeding on men. He is doing all of this and cannot do anything.

"It has to stop." His father is not stating the truth so much as making a promise.

"There's no one we can ask for help." His mother is not making a statement either; it's only a reiteration of his father's own decision, because no one with what Ienzo has—with magic—lives easily, and anyway Ienzo has never been allowed meet anyone with magic because that is not something people like his family do, that is not the kind of company anyone self-respecting keeps. Especially not the son of a martial adviser who stands to lose everything at any moment to any scandal.

No, a report cannot be made. A formal request to the king is out of the question. _The neighbors must not, please, Ienzo, please, the neighbors must _not_ know_—

His cheek and side are burning from the vent but every other part of him shivers in comparison, pinpricked skin, and he's always so tired now, almost asleep already here on the floor, every slender margin of energy drawn out of him again and again to fuel the endless illusions he cannot control.

Someone smooths down his hair, pats the cool side of his head. But no one is in their home except his parents downstairs. He's sure of that, almost.

Ienzo Amaryllis does not know what real is anymore. Hasn't known what real was since the first snow last winter when his mother—still happy, both of them still whole and certain and incautious—when his mother slipped a Midnight Anklet over his foot and said it would protect him from things like the beast with its brain stem wriggling.

"We can't live in a mirage anymore."

"It's not like there's anything we can—" His mother doesn't finish her sentence; Ienzo listens to the words drop off into an incoherent keening. It means only what his father has already said, but somehow it digs at Ienzo even deeper. Adults do not cry.

And then he is angry and miserable in equal parts, scowling back hot, concentrated tears because even though his tutor (when he still was allowed to go to the tutor's) told him again and again he was smart enough to understand _anything_ and he _does_ understand that being an adult doesn't mean you can solve any particular problem—still, they are his parents and he is their son and that means that somehow they should _fix_ him when something important inside has ceased to function. But he doesn't think that is the conclusion either one of them will come to tonight.

"If we…" his mother begins and then stops, and he imagines she is biting her lip. "If we sent him to someone better suited…"

Even through the vents, Ienzo can hear the sharp sigh his father draws over his teeth. "You mean SeeD?"

"I… I don't know who I…"

"It's impossible. Ansem—the damn peace-loving fool—has had them formally disbanded." Clearly, his father has considered this option before. The man is a military adviser after all. There's another rap of his father's fist against the wooden arm of the sofa. "But they've been de facto decommissioned for years anyway. All that's left of them is a load of fat old fools living off anniversary articles on their glory days."

It's quiet for a long time. Ienzo tries not to think about what any of it means. If he thinks about being sent away, the whole house might just vanish.

His mother makes some muffled _ums_ and _ah_s before her next wistful admission. "If only there were some sort of book…"

His mother likes books. At least, she likes the kinds that tell their readers what to do: recipe-a-day books and self-help books and how-to guides and books of law which govern her actions very tidily without any need for self-insertion.

"There're plenty out there." His father laughs like a grinding stone. "But not on the right subject. I don't need to know how to kill a _Sorceress_, I need—" A crumbling of the logs in the fireplace below his grate obscures Ienzo's father's words, which Ienzo does not know if he should be thankful for. Perhaps the man meant to say something which might have given his son hope, some indication that his father believes there is a cure, or at least some way to become unobtrusive, neither seen nor heard. Or, when Ienzo quietly, quietly allows himself to wish for it: maybe his father is downstairs suggesting a way to master this, so Ienzo can shove it to the deepest-down hollow in his heart and never let it out again.

It's not like he hasn't tried. Not like he hasn't spent the last six months retracing every scientific methodology he has ever been taught, testing and retesting hypotheses according to the textbook steps. But there is no rhyme or reason here, no predictable pattern, no stable conditions to make his control group.

All he can find are variables of variables. Everything changes. Endless reverse sublimation. And no one to be proud of his discovery that he can no more will the illusions away than will them into being, no more order the sun to alter its course in the sky than return the moon to its place when a stray thought brings it down around their heads.

If he were smarter or stronger… If he could only_ fail_ to meet high expectations, instead of being the child for which all expectations are already of failure…

Again there's a soothing, cool hand on his face. His parents have been quiet another long stretch, a sort of helpless, furious silence. Something goes scuttling along the floorboards below, which makes his mother gasp sharp and loud.

"Ignore it," his father snaps, and whatever it is _must_ be ugly to make her react at all when ugly things are now quite commonplace.

"If this hadn't happened…" But she says that same thing every night, and like every night, on this one she cannot finish the sentence, cannot imagine anymore a future in which the clocks tick the right direction and no half-transparent strangers lean over the kitchen counter to ask her why she isn't better at any of the things she chooses to do.

Ienzo hears his mother's throat constrict, hears the thickening hitch in her breath that means tears, which is also the same as every other night.

"If this hadn't…"

There is the slow, repetitive knocking of his father's fist on the divan which seems to do a great deal of speaking on its own. And then the tapping of heels tells Ienzo his mother is on her feet again, pacing; underneath the quiet rushing of the fire, he thinks he hears the sound of her skirts, familiar to him from the days he clung to them, a dry swill like wheat in a summer wind.

Only now there is something strangely solemn, something resolute and final in the noise, and the air from the grate doesn't feel warm to him anymore—instead it seems to sting him with a chill that sets his teeth hard against each other. It isn't like it's rare now, to listen to them grieving, but something tonight feels different (by which he might mean _solid_) and to be noticed through the perpetual mutation of his illusions, it must be something meaningful.

The mothering voice in his ear which does not belong to and has never belonged to his mother says, "Come away from there, Ienzo." There is incoherent, agitated buzzing in between. "Come away from there." He thinks this voice is probably only his commonsense talking, some spiteful manifestation of mental self-preservation. It wants to keep him sane, most likely, but it is very late.

His stomach clenches and then his lungs, and before he can stop himself, he wonders if tonight is the night they will finally decide that it isn't abandonment if there are mitigating circumstances and really it might just be better for everyone if (it would be better for everyone, maybe, because he hasn't been allowed outside in three weeks and no one has even noticed he's gone)… Or maybe tonight, his father, who has never been without an answer or an outline, might reveal one last shred of hope from a dark corner at the bottom of the box, one final, dangerous but—as always—ultimately successful gambit to seal the divisions in their fractured family.

Ienzo would follow any plan of his father's. Had always.

There's the heavier sound then that Ienzo equates with his father's stiff boots. The footsteps cross the floor and join his mother's heels so that each stops in time and he knows they are holding each other, momentarily a united front.

Something shivers like insect wings just below his heart, which Ienzo thinks of as the feeling that comes between anticipation and anxiety.

They are whispering to each other and he presses closer again to the grate to listen, willing the fire to die down for a moment so he can catch their words.

He hears his mother say that she wants her old son back. The one who could be trusted to walk himself home from the tutor's and not return in tears over teeth and claws.

His father says back that there is no old Ienzo and no new, only one continuous cask which, under the pressure, has finally developed a crack and let all the rotten wine inside seep out—an infant who, learning to speak too early, cannot stop the words once they have begun, ejects an endless stream of nonsense with a look of distress on his face even as he is privately satisfied by his own noise and perseverance.

Their heads must be near together now, forehead to forehead, so that they can speak in a private world inside the world he has warped beyond understanding. Some of the words are muffled, but Ienzo understands his father's intention: whatever this dark descent, the rapid burrowing in of insanity, it was in Ienzo all along, predestined or at least predisposed. His father isn't wrong, like he is never wrong. Maybe.

His parents must be moving closer to the fire now, because when his father speaks again, lower still, Ienzo does not mistake a single word.

"Rather," his father intimates, "we should wish that he didn't exist."

It is only what has been on all their minds for weeks. It does not come as a surprise to Ienzo.

But still…

Still. He pulls himself up from his prone position on the floor and stands, although it does not feel like it. The floor seems to roll under him, and maybe he has changed angles too quickly, because he feels the blood rush to his head, black out his vision and send him reeling.

He stays upright but only barely, small hands outstretched and searching for support he will not find: they have been decreasing the number of furniture pieces in the house in the mistaken belief that that will make them stop appearing where they should not be. And anyway, he was never one for childish sentimentality, throws away all the puzzles after he finishes them so there is nothing to leave a cluttered trace.

(Rather, that he never existed.)

It isn't like he hasn't thought it. Isn't like he doesn't know how much easier that might make things, how much relief it would bring. But it's one thing to think it, and another to feel the weight of the words when they come in his father's voice, which has always been the citadel he retreats to at the first sign of uncertainty or potential for harm.

Mostly he thinks _why_ and not _why me_.

It's another thing entirely now that he knows his father would prefer relief too. That compared to commanding the situation, his father—who has always been built of stone so snugly fit he needs no mortar—has decided to surrender.

The last thing Ienzo ever wanted to be was a burden.

A small, pale hand appears and takes Ienzo's unbalanced one. The grip is gentle, fumbling, of course familiar. It doesn't make the last of the vertigo recede but as Ienzo looks up and meets the eyes of his own mirror image, it is necessarily distracting.

The copy does not say anything. They never say anything really, mostly because it seems their thoughts and his (if they have thoughts, both of them) are easily legible to each other, consistently coincident. Instead it watches him with big, concerned eyes, coddles his hand in both of its own. It is far from the first carbon copy he has accidentally produced, but the circumstances and also perhaps the excess of moonlight (or is it jungle-tinted sun?) entering the window reveal all its uncanny closeness, the perfection of its mimicry a stark silhouette against the very wrongness of its being.

What he means is _How can I be so small?_

He is diminutive, barely taller than his own mattress at seven and a half years old, a foot or a thousand miles from reaching his own sock drawer in the dresser. He looks like a scale model of a boy held together by nothing but adhesive and will. A stray breeze could blow him over; certainly he has been eating less, had less appetite lately for his mother's food which always somehow ends up burnt now, but since he has not seen himself in a mirror in months, the excruciating slenderness of the figure in front of him takes him by surprise.

His wrists look skeletal, and the hollow below his copy's visible eye is a red and purple bruise hole from every long night when the feeling of something else invisible crawling into his bed wakes him at every half hour. The rest of his skin is waxy. Not enough sunlight, not enough care. Apparently there is a split in his chapped lips which he did not even know about until now. When he reaches up with his free hand to touch his own face, he finds the split reflected exactly from the copy, can't even tell himself apart anymore.

Ienzo knows, somewhere in the inconsequential areas of his mind, that he is a child. He is small, and physically weak, and still dependent on others for basic necessities. But for all that, he has not thought of himself as young in a long time, since even before the magic, since the first day maybe that he composed verse in Latin about lovers who moved from star to star, the chase from Aries to Libra through the dragon curled around the final, polar heart and his tutor refused to believe that it had come from him, searched for weeks through his collection of the classic poetry, insisting Ienzo's work had been lifted from an older master.

Or the first time the physics teacher admitted there was simply no new work for him to read, no new material to study—although perhaps he would like to discuss that last theory of his, on the wave-particle duality of photons?

Or even the way he must speak more simply for his mother, quiet, unassuming words so as not to upset her conceptions of a well-raised child…

He doesn't feel young, even if when he looks at his own body he is forced to admit it. Or not. Or not. Maybe he doesn't even look like a child anymore. He just looks desolate.

He looks dead already.

The copy nods, a single bobbing of partially-matted hair (reflexively, Ienzo lifts his free hand to his own head to brush out what tangles he can). It smiles, or something like it: thin-lipped agreement, not amusement. It meets Ienzo's own eyes directly, mise en abîme, an endless back and forth of blue and blue.

Then, for once, the look in its eyes (his own) is something Ienzo cannot read, a message which deaf ears might have a better chance of catching. It's anxious and caring and fearful and sacrificial all in a single blow which causes Ienzo's own heart to stutter in his chest. He doesn't understand, doesn't like this—

It looks like him and doesn't exist.

The copy lets go of his hand and takes a single step back. Then lifts itself with his skin-thin wrists onto the coverlet, contorting so that it sits upright with its legs stretched out toward the foot of the bed.

Ienzo doesn't know what is happening here, hates that feeling, has always hated _not knowing_—

It leans its head back, the perfect mimic of his bangs falling away from the copy's right eye so that his whole, clear, pale face is revealed and the exposed white arch of his throat.

A fleeting, wondrous thought crosses Ienzo's mind that this might be a peace offering direct from his own manic visions, a chance for him to slip into the outside world completely unnoticed by his father and just not _come back_. He could excise himself and his problems from his family like a cancer, which might come across as heroic.

But none of the illusions ever last. All the dreaming turns into new dreams.

And outside, still lurking, are the wolves.

(Or what if they never come looking for him? What if he fades out into invisibility again so long or often that there's just nothing left?)

_ Rather, that he never_—

The copy kicks its feet once and then twice on the coverlet. It smiles again (almost).

Then, without warning or sound even, the copy begins to crumble. _No_, Ienzo keeps his wits only long enough to think, _no, it is splitting_. The white line of its borrowed throat opens jagged like the teeth of a zipper, pulling further and further back, a second wet grin that stretches so far around the pillar of his neck it aims for beheading, arterial rushing swift to coat the down of his pillow, his mother's careful patchwork.

By the time the bare thought of moving is across his head, the unfolding of the copy's skin has begun in a thousand other places on its (his) body, a myriad windstorm of open wounds, every stitch in the doll's seams ripping out at once, little threads of skin uncoiling around his fingers, the backs of its hands, beneath his clothes, and in the purple-read hollows of its eyes…

Beneath, the scarlet muscle is jumping, twitching in time to the copy's minute motions. Grey-yellow hints of bone push through. The copy swallows once in a reflex he does not think it has, and the split in its throat seizes and rolls and leaks. _It isn't real_, Ienzo says to himself, repeating. _Notrealnotrealnotreal_ but he lies on the covers suffocating in his own blood with his whole body unraveling and who's to say which of them is the copy when there's no flaw in either except all the flaws that brought them both here together, inside the—

There's a sodden sound of saturated lungs and no comprehension in the copy's eyes now, so that Ienzo is sure there is no one there anymore (was no one there all along _remember that please remember_—) but still, of its own volition, Ienzo watches his mauled body arc off his soaked mattress, the last uncontrollable jerking of a brain deprived of so much oxygen. From his own flailing torn arms on the copy, a spattering of blood strikes his hair, face, exposed eye; he is frozen, unable to even clear the hot damp from his cheek, from his upper lip, from his scalp, sinking down and down maybe back to its original source at last.

The copy is still and quiet on the quilt then, ceasing like a half-sealed fountain the first freeze of winter. It doesn't breathe.

On the bed, Ienzo's body stares open-eyed and torn (_claws and teeth and teeth and teeth_). He is unmistakably dead. Ienzo manages one breath before he begins to scream.

Except the sound that comes out isn't his voice, isn't even human. It's breaking glass and animal howling and that Hyne-damned grandfather clock and all of it at the same decibel as background noise, just another off-time chiming of their senses gone wrong, and so his parents do not even stir downstairs, do not bother to look up from their own clouded collusion and he is left in the room with the dead thing—_why why why is it not disappearing that is what the unreal things do they vanish and especially if they die they do not stay _because even deep down he has never wanted to see that touch that be near that_ why_—and his own throat going hoarse but none of his own voice leaving it (_they never say much of anything_).

He falls down hard where he is standing beside the bed, and with the grandfather clock still ringing off his tongue, he beats his fists against the floorboard. The sound is right but therefore inconsequential; he does not weigh enough to make the blows echo through the heavy wood down to his parents, who have long since lost trust in their ears.

They will not hear. They will not come.

He cries or he was crying all along and had not noticed, and with his face all but buried in his knees folded in half, one tear and then a half dozen fall on to the floor.

The entire house shakes with each drop as if the city were sinking beneath them. On the high shelves, his book collection wavers and topples over like dominoes. The stone walls groan.

Downstairs, his father slams one heavy boot against the floor, snarls something unintelligible and then shouts, his voice carrying up through the grate even over Ienzo's chapel bell hiccups: "That is _enough_ for one night. Do you _intend_ for the whole street to hear?" But there are his father's feet on the stairs finally. Ienzo can barely breathe between the shaking of his whole body and the sparking flood of relief. He lets his heated forehead rest against the floor, just sticking more blood to it.

There's a calming voice in the hallway and his mother is there too just beyond his door, and then the knob creaks and Ienzo knows without looking that the doorway is full of parents who will tell him—who will say—

He feels more than sees them go rigid on the threshold. Their gasps are proportionate and equally audible. His father is the one who makes the low, animal sound this time, like it's him who's been mortally wounded. He regains his faculties first and seems to cross the room in a single wild step, until he is leaning over the copy on the bed, touching its cheek, its chest.

He does not look at Ienzo uncurling on the floor. From the doorway, his mother turns her eyes from the copy, the bed, and his father, and looks down, to where her (real) son is sitting stained but living. Ienzo meets her eyes. She shudders so thoroughly it looks as if her knees are giving out beneath her.

Beside him, his father's legs are trembling too. Ienzo reaches out and curls one hand in his father's pant leg. He pulls once, twice, and then a third time with increasing weight behind the gesture but nothing happens—his father does not look down, does not pause in his ministrations to find the source of the pull. Maybe he doesn't feel it at all.

His father is a stream of words which at times seem to be comprehensible language and at other times are just noise, Ienzo's name the chorus line to which he constantly returns. He seems to be alternately searching for a pulse, pressing closed the gapping void at the copy's throat, and simply clutching what he can of the child not like this will bring him back but only because he must, must have something to hold on to or it will all slip away, fragments of symbolic dream that always dissolve on waking.

"God, God—Ienzo—my God, what have you done? What have you _done_ Ienzo, tell me."

"N-Nothing, I didn't do anything Father; it isn't—I'm here. I'm right here." But his voice doesn't seem to carry, doesn't reach his father, anyway, although his mother seems to understand, steadies herself with the door frame and breathes long and slow, in and out, one slender hand pressed close to her heart as if preventing it from leaping out between her ribs.

"You can't," his father is ordering, shutting the copy's eye even so with a thumb that lingers in blood-clumped eyelashes. "You can't be, you can't be, you can't be—"

"Eitan—" his mother calls from the doorway. "Eitan, Ienzo is—"

His father ignores her interruption, refuses to hear. "Why?" he asks the copy, bracing under its neck and back to lift it over his knees, fold it around himself. The motion disturbs the fleshless patches on its arms, the hole through its throat which bubbles and gurgles almost like a voice and for a second the hopeful expression on his father's face hits Ienzo like a weighted stone.

Belatedly, he thinks _we should wish_ does not mean _we _do_ wish_.

"Father!" he's shouting without really meaning to, but even jumping, even with the leverage of the bed beside him and pulling at his father's expensive pressed top now stained red all over (_but it's all right, it's all right because it isn't real none of this is real at all_ _please listen_) he can't catch his father's attention. It's like he doesn't exist at all.

Ienzo's mother starts across the room, staring with haunted eyes between the corpse on the bed and the animate body on the floor, and it's hot rocks in Ienzo's stomach this time when he realizes she doesn't trust him, can't tell the difference between the dead doll and the living one. She hasn't decided yet if she should be grieving or furious.

He says, "Mother, I'm the real one," which doesn't change her expression in the slightest.

His father has gathered the copy closer, pressed his face into the blue fall of its hair, and only because he is close can Ienzo hear the muffled flood of consolations which begin with _my son _and somewhere evolve into the whispered call: "Tactician," his father says as if somehow that alone can bring him back. "My little tactician." It is the last of the childhood gifts from his father, a nickname given in the middle of the make-believe war games requisite of every six-year-old boy which for Ienzo always began and ended with the war planning—supply lines and armored mounts—and never made it quite to marching out.

His father had told him the name was something best left behind with all the make-believe. Now, inside the whole world make-believe, it sounds in his voice exactly as warm as it first was, still, impossibly, just as proud. Ienzo's father does not cry, has never cried probably, but there's a heaving of his father's stomach beside Ienzo which is almost like a voiceless sob.

"That isn't me!" Ienzo insists. He rounds on his mother, begging in every way possible to be believed, because if no one else will believe it, how can he? "Mother, it's just another copy!"

This seems to get through to her at last, makes her jerk and then stand a little straighter, square her jaw and chase the wetness from the bottom wells of her eyes. "Eitan," she tries again, approaching his father slow with her arms open like she might need to hold him in place, not that she could if she tried. "It's another illusion. It's just another illusion. Ienzo is fine. Ienzo is here. He's still here."

His father's voice is starkly level when it comes. "Look out the window," he says.

Both Ienzo's head and his mother's snap upward toward the window; Ienzo had not even seen his father staring out it, so what could possibly have attracted his attention there—

Framed in the glass on the other side of his bed is the same vivid, humid jungle. The massive otter is gone, and now, in its place, a mile long snake is swimming languorously across the river in smooth swoops of its spine. It's not particularly different than it was before.

Ienzo looks to his mother first. The way her brow is furrowed and her eyes narrow slits says that she cannot figure out what they are supposed to be seeing either, what his father might consider so important. Ienzo looks out the window again but if she is seeing what he is seeing, the snake in the steamed garden, then surely that must be what they _all _are—

"You can see the street outside," his father says, monotone where there should be shock and joy at seeing real things for once. There's nothing like relief, nothing but a sort of grim, mortar-blown despair. "There are leaves on the neighbor's roof," he continues.

The moment has thrown Ienzo so far off base that comprehension dawns on him only very, very slowly. He is alive still. His mother can see him. Both of _them_ are still seeing the illusion of another world outside the window.

But his father is not. His father is cradling the corpse copy to himself saying his son is dead and when he looks out the window what he _doesn't_ see is the mirage.

Ienzo tries again, his motions jerking and half-automatic—he knows the outcome of the experiment already, knows exactly what is going on here—he reaches up and grabs his father's arm and tries his hardest to pull it toward himself, to latch on and reveal his presence by simply refusing to let go.

It's like trying to move a brick wall by throwing pebbles. His father's arm might as well not even feel his weight. Well, the truth is it just _doesn't _feel his weight. He certainly does not look down at Ienzo's final, frantic call, or back at his wife begging him to see what she sees so she'll know she's not the one still dreaming.

His father is not free from the nightmare. He has traded a thousand small miseries for a single, all-encompassing hallucination: to his eyes, the source of the magic is dead, and all the misplaced spells have gone with him. The monsters and the mysterious noises must all be gone, but the living boy standing right next to him might as well be a ghost now. Might well be a ghost now.

(Ienzo doesn't want to be a burden.)

His mother realizes only this: her husband sees a body and the real world while she sees a living boy and at least one lie.

(He also doesn't want to disappear.)

What is the truth? What can anyone still call reality in this godforsaken house?

His mother doesn't know anymore. She doesn't know anything anymore.

She sweeps a wet-eyed look from the window to her husband slumped over the blood-soaked blankets to Ienzo, her (real) son back-lit by the warm jungle light filtering in the window, blood all along his face, his eyes like two warding amulets set above the open, stunned circle of his mouth and all of him, even after all this, still somehow digging the knife in deeper.

Her knees give out as expected at last. "_Why _are you doing this to me?" she sobs.

He says "I don't know" and "I'm sorry" until he doesn't have a voice anymore.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

"He's been dead six months, Dahlia, please sit down."

His mother hesitates, holding the plate she's brought (always brings) for Ienzo despite knowing that she won't ever be allowed to put it down. (Well, by now, Ienzo thinks, it is nothing but for show, a ritual to illustrate to her son how much of a good mother she really must be, how long-suffering, how well-meaning. No matter, the effect is the same: the plate never gets to him, only teases with its perpetual presence.) He sits through each meal in agonized silence not daring to filch even bread from the basket for fear it will trigger his father, reveal the subtle amounts his mother manages to save while cooking so that he can eat dinner at all.

If his father thinks something is missing, if he discovers the rolled napkin she's taken to hiding close to her body, he will seize it, will rage and pity and pray out loud for his poor wife who must have lost her mind at the sight of their son's body and now won't stop feeding his ghost. Food hoarding, he calls it, and it might have been, if Ienzo was not mostly convinced he did still need to eat to live.

She sits down at the table, puts the plate out of sight. For a long time there is no noise but his father's silverware; his mother barely serves herself.

"You need to eat," his father says finally, somewhere between the air of a commanding officer and a condescending social worker for the clinically addled.

"So does he—" she begins, an ornamental objection which they all know never changes anything.

His father interjects, "Listen to yourself." He doesn't raise his voice but is agitated and agitates the air nonetheless. "You're carrying on a crazy dream; it isn't healthy. The hallucinations are _gone_. Isn't that enough proof for you?"

How could it be, when for her the walls still change color daily, when their son still peeks over his knees at her, hungry and imploring? It's like a too-small cage. A trap box inside which she cannot even turn around. There's no truth or true way to win. To wake up each morning, to move and breathe, is half-insurmountable and only growing worse.

Ienzo tries not to look at her too often anymore. But it is hard not to look, because the only other body to which he is close possesses perfectly closed senses, a gaze that smoothly slides over him like the brook over its stones, unseeing, unhearing, unfeeling.

He tries not to look, but it's like neighbors who argue behind open windows: he never means to linger but once the point of contact is made he cannot help but notice and re-notice the way her grey eyes sit so far down in her head now, the skin beneath them belled out, fine lines appearing at every corner and angle even though she is still young in general terms. She skips washing so that he can use the day's hot water when his father is not home, neglecting the care of her long hair and well-bred features that before had been a rather solitary source of pride. Her hands shake all the time now such that numerous nervous tears in her dresses are seamed closed by messy and uneven stitches for which she does not forgive herself.

He has become the center on which she relies but she will not hold. They are both, or all, headed into ruination.

His parents don't fight like this all the time, but it is becoming more frequent. In the months just after the copy, his father had himself been like a sleepwalker. But with time working on the wound and quiet clarity working on his mind, he began again, began to move past grieving into the state of relief brought on by seeing his own reflection in mirrors once more.

Then, and only then, did it became apparent that Ienzo's mother was not moving on with him, that she refused to delight in the image of their _street_ out the front window.

Of course Ienzo's father had waited. Mothers, after all, he reasoned, need longer to heal. But two months turned to three, and three to four, and she continued to bring the third plate to the table, to look over her shoulder at things that weren't there—continued to talk, even, with the boy as if he still sitting by the fire between them.

He had let it go too long, let it advance too far. While he had been quietly healing, she had been deteriorating, sense slipping out between her fingers like grains of sand in an hour glass. Soon she would be yelling from the rooftops that their son was still alive, when half the Sector had attended his funeral.

This behavior needed to end, Ienzo's father had said, and it needed to end soon.

She eats reluctantly, and although Ienzo mostly watches the table, trying not to think about the tastes of dinner things when they are warm and how swiftly they change when they are not, he can feel the weight of her eyes flicking up and down, on to him and away.

The sound of her silverware slower and behind his father's gives the whole room the funeral feeling of chiming hand bells, and the air is so thick, any hope of conversation is stifled. Anyway, they have nothing to say to each other. She cannot speak to her son across the table without inciting chastisement from her husband; she cannot speak to her husband without turning her eyes sometimes to look at Ienzo; probably, Ienzo thinks, she won't want to hear anything he has to say. Not that he has anything to say anymore, with no new lessons, limited knowledge of the Garden goings-on, too many dreams by far to share any one. No new books to read even, although she is trying.

They're all dead-locked. Stagnating. Just waiting and waiting for something to change or break it all down into irreparable pieces.

Dabbing the hard edge of his mouth with his embroidered napkin, Ienzo's father makes cursory attempts at conversation, tries to engage his wife in the proper topics of politics and urban frivolities. Ienzo goes back to staring at the table, not able to focus anymore on who is hoping to undercut whose voting base or who is suspected of accepting funds from this or that private individual. Court political jockeying has its own appeal to him; he is almost always willing to hear about this or that treachery or how a particularly clever manipulation has been executed, but tonight he is more tired and lonely than usual.

He wants to leave the table but he doesn't want to leave the table, and he wants to be away from the unpleasant way his father's eyes blink over him, but if he does not at least sit here in the presence of some other living beings, the only things he will have to keep him company at all will be the monsters, slipping up behind to breathe over his shoulders in the dark. He has to hear real voices speaking. He has to see real faces.

Painful though it always is, dinner ends too soon by half for Ienzo's taste, and though his father retreats to the study down the hall from their dining room, his mother does not quite dare to (perhaps, somewhere inside, cannot decide if she even wants to) wish Ienzo good night. She clears the table to busy her hands so she is also not required to hug him or kiss his brow (contact makes it all worse, all of it), and the stacking of the plates demands the constant vigilance of her eyes.

It is still early. Before the illusions, he had always chosen his own hours, his father permissive of late night reading so long as Ienzo never once complained of being woken in the morning, was never once late to any meeting with the tutors. Now Ienzo is always on the brink of sleep or just beyond it, no way to distinguish, of course, whether at any given hour he is awake or unconscious. But sometimes he does genuinely dream good dreams—of believing everything he sees and being believed. And now there is no good reason _not_ to be asleep, when his father will not stand over him in the library suggesting a book or two for re-reading, reinterpreting through the lens of this or that new theorist. And if he just went to sleep early tonight, like every night, it would make the evening easier for his mother. He has made her anxious long enough today.

"Good night," he says, and like always, "I love you."

His father is a room away but might as well have his ear pressed to the wall. He especially hates her talking to Ienzo; there is something inherently indicative of insanity in conversing with a person who simply isn't there. She does not dare to say good night. Or anything else.

When she has cleared the final dishes and is lingering in the kitchen, fretting her wash rag between her two hands to the time of some ghostly music box tinkling far away, Ienzo drops out of his too-tall chair and escorts himself carefully to the place he calls his room now.

He no longer lives in the second floor bedroom near the chimney. When his mother's grieving had first begun to look obsessive, when it first seemed to carry on too long, his father made the hard decision: they would clean out Ienzo's room. With his mother mumbling desperate protests that fell on deaf ears—protests that had never, in the first place, really intended to stand up for themselves—his father resolutely gathered up his things and sealed them away in a scant few boxes, every shred of his clothing, every leather-bound tutoring notebook, even the sheets for his small bed folded up tight and made to vanish. Reminders, he must have thought, would only make his wife's mental situation worse. She had to let go.

Ienzo had had to let go. Unable to bring himself to fill it with new furniture or storage, his father had sealed the door to the old room tight and hidden the key. His mother had searched for it. Ienzo himself had searched for it, of course. But no matter how many drawers he opened or books he rifled through or boxes he overturned, there had been no key. Maybe it had gone out with the garbage or—more likely—maybe his father carried it on him, even now, the only hidden memento he could permit himself in a house shared with a wife so close to the edge of madness.

Ienzo had taken up a spot on the divan in the living room for a short while, but that brought its own set of quiet miseries: his father would see the blankets and pillows his mother left out and seize them, leaving Ienzo night after night to huddle in the cold air or near the embers in the hearth. It was equally unpleasant to wake up half numb and discover he was being sat upon by his father, who could no more feel than see him. Worst, of course, was the proximity of the man at all times. Even if he was all the way down the corridor, it never seemed possible for Ienzo's mother to avoid his attention, and night after night her attempts to feed Ienzo dinner were thwarted by furious intervention.

So, although it was unsettling to be away from everything familiar, it was Ienzo himself who suggested the final move, Ienzo himself who carried his last remaining blanket up and up into the attic.

Their attic is a dark space, and small, not tall enough even for his mother to stand up exactly straight. Yet it fits him, somehow, the lowest beams of the rafters a foot above his head and cradling, not stifling, in their nearness. Neither of his parents are untidy, but in the narrow corners of forgettable rooms, it is only natural for the detritus of the living to gather, and evenly stacked crates and boxes of his mother's old clothing quietly crawling with silverfish dot the stone floor, converting the open layout of the room into a dust-laden labyrinth.

There are half moon windows at either end of the floor, but from most places in the attic where there is enough room for him to stand they cannot be seen, and so it is perpetually gloomy, half-lit at best.

In fact, all of it but the occasional house spider suits him, in its own way. The attic is a manageable space, an untouched area which can be controlled down to its minutiae. He cleans what he has to when he has to in order to move what he wants, re-sculpting the maze into one of his own design, complex pathways inaccessible to all but a child of his size. In this way, he still has secrets. In this way, he has holes for hiding when the influx of nightmares begins to press eyes to the crevices between boxes. He can retreat, inevitably, to the hollow beneath his mother's old iron dress form, the bell curve of the metal a diving cage to keep out every serpent and kraken.

Beyond the cast-off labyrinth of his design, in the corner farthest from the stairwell, he has built a safehouse of old quilt batting and clothing, blankets and hand towels, a composite mattress dressed out in patched tailcoats and lace knit tablecloths. It's the last defensible location, a fort or secret base, and there is the final flicker of childhood in him. He has never been good at having the sort of fun that children have, but there must be something universal in it, something intrinsically appealing about rolling up in a father's coat in a soft hidden place built by his own hands keeping the whole of the universe at bay.

The attic is so quiet that from across the room he can hear his mother's uneven footsteps at the bottom of the stair. She knocks once and then again against the wall down the stairs, unspoken language for the fact that she will come again later when she can come unwatched. This also is ritual.

For a long time that night it is nothing but mercifully dark. Then he wakes up much later to uncommon sounds, uncommonly muffled.

For a moment he turns on his makeshift mattress, unwilling to get up even if it is his mother come again—but it isn't, some under part of his consciousness aware that it is too loud, too harsh and high to be anyone attempting stealth, and anyway it is two voices clashing. He sits up groggy in his bed, the blanket clutched close to his shoulders, and he listens.

Distant and stifled—who closed the attic door?—Ienzo hears, "This is it, Dahlia. No more."

"Let me go," his mother is saying back, more bite in her words that Ienzo has ever heard, and more finality too, so that even through the last vestiges of sleep the gravity of the situation strikes him and he sits up straighter, feels every muscle under his skin begin to tense. They are fighting for real this time, for real—not his father making a demand that will inevitably be answered by a _yes, dear_ but his father holding her back and she's refusing. The thought is so unbelievable, and the truth so untrustworthy to begin with, that for a long minute he believes he is still dreaming, conjuring a deep-down desire for confrontation into almost living beings, shells of his parents acting out his own need for resolution.

But maybe it's that his mother's will and sentience has finally broken down, and, clinging desperately to the pestle ground pieces of her promised happy (easy) life, she has been forced to make some stand. He hears her shouting in ways and ranges he never could have imagined, like nothing he would ever want to dream.

"You _will_ let me go. I don't care if you make the rules for this house; even if I _am_ insane, I'll do what I have to—if it means I have to go around or over or under you—because I might not know what's real anymore, but I know what needs to be done, and there's no way I can look at the face of our _son _and let him starve like a dog you don't want."

But it isn't the dinners he really needs, Ienzo thinks. It isn't the food so much as the contact, so much as the natural trust which he never put much stock in before he felt that cold tingling beneath all his skin and he vanished from the world, fell into the playground of the fata morgana, dragging his whole family in with him wailing. He only wants someone to believe in him again.

"You can't abandon someone who isn't _there_!"

"How do you _know_ that he isn't there?" Their voices rise in pitch and speed until they are two engine pistons variably shrieking, back and forth closer to the door; he presses his hands over his ears, but it is not enough, has never been enough, and even burying his face in the blanket just traps the sounds of their scuffling closer. He can imagine all their movements in the hall like snake and bobcat _two mouths open full of teeth_ peeling away at each other's skin—there's a sound like someone pushed into a wall which he believes and doesn't believe because half of what he hears he invented and he can't see, it's inimitably dark and cramped and hulking shadows blacker than black all around him are milling, leaning in—

"I'm only doing what's best for you—"

"You don't know! You do _not_ know what's—"

"Because I love you and will always—"

"Let me go!" Something against stone the room swims before his eyes in a heat haze splitting rippling—

"And I loved him too, you know. I loved him _just_ as much as you! That's why you have to let him rest in _peace!_"

A sharp, single cry something like a monster scuttling his father's boots and reverberating still out of six month memory his father's fist on the divan slowly, slowly knocking. _That he never. That he never_.

"He won't rest! He just won't lie down and—"

And behind Ienzo's eyelids pushing in his eyes pushing down everything inward he can hear their bodies moving or he can see and smell something underneath which is a familiar metal or meat, white as moonlight straight-edge cutting like his mother's knife dripping out of her hand cutting and from their bodies in the dark, neither one seeing the other but still moving forward and away in motions all bone all angle the tissue stripped away the skin in threads stripped away all the blood it smells like blood only no one is bleeding he doesn't think yet the world shivered.

In the hall down the stairs at the backs of his eyes he sees his mother her hair behind her shoulders falling all over the door also herself a wall with her arms open her fingers canted forward a little animal in the corner. Her mouth is an open line panting her eyes all over white and searching.

His father is before her waiting but not really only looking for the seam so that he can move through no it must be around her so he can also search but for what?

"Why are you in my way, Dahlia?" he asks, which is what Ienzo both wants to and does not.

(She knows Ienzo's father will not find anything in the attic even if he searches. So why is she fighting him? Why is she making a stand like something has changed, like his father hasn't stopped her numerous times already from sneaking things to Ienzo and yes, this is the first time he's discovered their attic hiding place—but maybe she thinks of this as the end. The attic was the his last safe haven and maybe now his father will change the lock below the old iron knob, trap Ienzo up behind the door and swallow that key too so that she can't get to him no matter how hard she tries, no matter how hard she pleads, no matter how hard he beats his weak hands against the other side of the wood and begs to be released before he starves—)

"Let me go," she says again and again only it's like the words don't even move her lips so maybe it isn't her saying them or maybe none of them needs a mouth anymore to speak. It is her voice still only it's not clear which of all possible directions she wants to go. From here there is neither a forward nor back.

But there is a massive movement in the hall or of the hall such that his father has both hands on his mother's shoulders then and is wresting the way he might wrest open a rusting door the way he might heave an immovable object. She is not (as always) pliant but catches his hands with the talon cups of her own and closes and closes in more than one way. Something gives.

Ienzo buries his face in the blanket which he can hear himself not really breathing through. His mother throws his father's hands to the side, their foreheads close together, her eyes not once blinking like grasshopper eyes white as moonlight and cutting like neither one of them even talks anymore but the corridor is full of noise and the claws in the crevices of the stonework tiny things crawling in high breathless notes.

His father reaches out to wrap around her like a black shadow when the light sets halfway, and he lifts her bodily off the floor and makes a little space between her and the door and Ienzo hates this or everything.

_ Why did I why did I why did I_

His mother starts to laugh from her place against the wall beside the door now her hair bunched up in tangles her blouse in hand-shaped bunches her mouth an open red seam emitting sound and also the smell like knife metal melting which is fear. She laughs just once which somewhere between the constriction of her bird-thin throat and the walled-in air of the hall becomes a whole chorus of bestial howling.

His father turns the knob on the attic door and Ienzo actually does hear (might hear) this through the walls of other detritus, the living_ memento mori_ in boxes squirming in the crates squirming one of his mother's dresses reaches out arms to him, and the door doesn't open because for this door also there is a key which his father does not have.

There is another revolution of the world or their world and his father turns back to his mother laughing again her eyelashes sewing themselves shut over the gray stagnant water of her eyes, and he says, level, "What are you hiding?"

It's not what she's hiding, but what she stands to lose. Maybe.

Something seizes up inside Ienzo, paper thin pretenses crumpling and the last shivering shard of hope left in the bottom of the jar unwinding to block every passage in his body, every one of his heartbeats wasted, bubbling backward in his chest so that all of his skin feels ice-sheathed in seconds and when he looks down at the blankets clenched in his fists, it isn't his grip that is turning the beds of his nails blue—it's something unnamable that pulls taut inside him, just a certain knowledge that nothing can or ever will be the same after this and that there is nothing he can do to save anyone (not his mother not his father not himself can't even just _stop_ it).

If the key to his old room has been thoroughly hidden, Ienzo knows the key to the attic has not. It's there, just under the high collar of his mother's dress on a thin cord waiting to be torn free and used, and then his father will be on the stairs, hunting with every quivering still he will find nothing and what then?

What then? His father will lock the attic door for good. How had Ienzo not seen that this labyrinth would become a trap? How had he not seen that his graveyard would be cast-off keepsakes in the insulated, dreamy dark?

His mother is quiet for maybe one second and then she laughs again, only this time it is a sort of spiteful crooning, a high, off-sweet wriggling of her throat. Still against the wall in the hallway below (Ienzo can see her but he can't he can't he can't), she tips her head back all the way and blind-eyed shoots her voice up into the floor of the attic, every breath a cutting swing. "You can look for it forever." She breaks the words over her teeth through her animal laughing. "You can look for it forever but you will never find it. You can look right into its face and never find it."

"Whatever you are hiding in this attic is _not _our son."

"Prove it." The giggling keeps seething up through crevices between the stones and sliding up Ienzo's arms like the golden millipedes of his father's buttons in the firelight like the scintillating shaft of brain cord exposed like _Darkness__ it's a ward against it's a ward against_ he reaches under his makeshift blankets to press the Midnight Anklet sharp against the inside of his hand.

"Whatever is there is _not_ Ienzo." It's not that his father's voice doesn't sound confident, only that it doesn't sound like his father's voice at all, some mangled thing made to come out of its rock-bored hiding hole and slither out into the air, formless and meaningless. "There will be nothing there but all this food you've been stealing from our mouths."

Not even that. He won't even find a single, rotting trace.

Still aware of the cold pressure jerking beneath his muscles near down to his bones, Ienzo feels himself leave his body almost, not wholly not a spectator above it all but like a shadow sticking to the bent light sticking to their feet two pairs struggling back and forth kicking out at each other's knees and crushing toes and ankles heels and leather soles scraping ugly jagged marks. He's an after-image ghost in the whirling of their hands weapons between each other like every glancing grappling of their fingers strikes him too. There in his mother's place seeing his father's eyes a black metal-solid shade in the dark so that his pupils bleed out indistinct and huge, his lips vanished pressed to a wound line of white tissue in his face, and then in his father's place down-turned to look at his mother not looking back just trying and trying to breathe under the depressions of her chest (not laughter now just something halfway between that and a choreographed rhythmic collapsing of her lungs).

"You can look," she murmurs, half song, still smiling. "You can look forever and you will not find it. It's all gone. Now everybody's waking. Now it's the morning now. Now."

"Give me the key to the attic," his father says. "Give it _now_. Let me end this madness." It's still not his voice but a sheet of metal flat shining and his hands are still on her shoulders or on her shoulders again a pressure not like the real intent to harm but to enclose to undermine and her hands are over the top of his nails fangs splitting the skin on the backs of his hands splitting the thickened visible veins there and still not looking at him but above above to where Ienzo is she trills, "Be my guest. End it."

Except she doesn't lift her hands from his, doesn't make any move to surrender the key, doesn't even blink her eyes in the dim, just moves, her head tipped back still slow and boneless from side to side as if she is counting the stars in the sky through the dark curtain of her roof. Her chest hitches a little so that her shoulders shake under his hands, which somehow just makes his father angrier like she can barely keep herself on her feet because she wants to tease or torture him, like it's all her fault.

Ienzo knows better but that's never changed anything. Or anyone.

She doesn't move to surrender the key and his father cannot pull his hands back so with a single violent tearing of limbs and limbs he snaps his hand forward, pointed, aimed directly for the long curve of her neck where he knows she must be keeping the key. She jerks her entire body away so roughly all the ends and hems of her being catch and scrape on the wall, a long line of displaced epithelial tissue opening up on the back of her neck, irreparable tangles making their way up the strands of her hair and after all that he follows, pushes forward still.

She's going to break herself escaping but he will break her just trying to save them all. Ienzo loves his father. Even now, when his fingers, too long and bone-laced the prying head of an arrow, lance around her scraped red skin and scratching, reaching leave welts he can imagine into being leave traces leave the space above her collar empty-handed.

"Give me the key!" he repeats, this time the militant shout, the command, and she has bowed to him and bowed to him until her backbone or whatever she propped herself aloft with before them had broken and now none of them know how to live without her bowing but she doesn't. She just doesn't. She jerks away from him again, doesn't seem to register at all when his nails catch across her cheek. She shudders back a step in the inky black of the hallway which moves around them with a mind of its own (tied to Ienzo's inextricably now and always maybe) so that it seems to carry her much farther away than she goes.

Elegant as ever like she isn't disheveled like her eyes aren't rolling over and tongue swollen in her mouth so she doesn't dare to close her lips for fear of biting it off like she isn't laughing still, uncontrollable under her breath, she draws her matted hair back, spills the water blue fall of hair over one shoulder and smoothly draws out the leather cord on which the key is swinging.

It's iron and plain and never has been anything less but now it looks like a weapon. Now he thinks _just don't give in just don't give in just don't let him lock me in like his senses like his mind like his heart have locked me out_.

The key dangles on the cord, and his father lunges for it where it hangs before her eyes, but she is ready for that, and she is not faster but she is more cruel and so when he reaches out she turns it so that the heavy, sharp head of the key faces his palm, faces outward toward the flesh rushing directly forward it.

The head of the key meets the face of his father's palm and glances sideways, tearing down his hand, turning his life line into a deep score. He doesn't flinch. Instead he closes his twitching fingers over the key and in one fierce motion rips the cord down, yanking her head forward, tangling in every flicker of her hair it can, until finally, with a half-audible snapping, it comes undone, splits around with a whipping across both sides of her neck. He extricates himself from her and spins on his heel, forcing the key toward the knob.

Behind him, she looks up only when the key has slid into the lock, displaced the tumblers and begun to turn the mechanism. Because Ienzo can see everything maybe is everything maybe invented all of this and his parents are actually sleeping soundly in their rooms—because he can see all of this, he sees behind his father his mother look up from the floor, her hair half over her face, sticking to the last vestiges of her lip paint the smudged edges of her smile, and her brow draws narrow and something in her eyes gray as mortar and harder by half sends every alarm bell ringing in his chest, tapping out messages of caution against the inside of his skull.

He wants to warn his father but he doesn't know what he is warning against or even if the only one he should be warning is himself. His father has the key to the attic now. He can make it disappear at any moment and how will his mother get to him them? How will she keep him safe still when the door between them would be almost a foot thick?

His father turns the lock on the attic door completely, and Ienzo hears the door shriek against the hard stone beneath, unused to ever being closed. No longer muffled, he hears the metal knob crashing back against the wall behind it, hears his father's boots echoing up the narrow stairwell together toward Ienzo's hiding place far back in the attic maze.

His father will not see him, but that doesn't matter. There is no way to win here except to _get out_, to get out of the attic before his father makes his final decision and Ienzo's only escape route is cut off.

Shrugging the blanket off in angry, frantic tugs, he tumbles free and forces himself to his feet. His legs shake, even his metatarsals quivering inside his feet so that he feels as if the whole world is a sea rolling beneath him, and were it not for the high walls of boxes and crates and disused furniture surrounding him, he might not be able to stand, let alone to begin creeping out of his safehole towards the stairwell.

He should be going cautiously, but caution in the face of his father is a thing of the past, the very first thing he taught himself to forget when he himself had been forgotten. He could walk right by the man and not be seen.

The floor stabilizes under him after he takes a few steps, and he reaches a hand out to trace the walls of his labyrinth in the dark. He knows the route now by heart but in the blackness any brace is a guardian string to lead him free. He takes a left between two propped up portrait frames, and then he ducks low to slide between a stack of crates. On the other side of the room, he hears his father begin to ascend the stairs, something off about his steps—too light, too slow, as if he intends to somehow sneak up on whatever disturbing collection he thinks his wife has been accumulating in these hiding holes throughout their home.

Somehow the sensation of his father creeping closer and closer in the dark makes Ienzo freeze between the crates, makes him shrink in his skin and his heart begins to jump and skitter. Why is he reacting this way? There isn't any reason: he will still be invisible, inaudible, undetectable to his father. But his heart wriggles like a dying insect, stuck and spilled out, anyway. He would go out of his way to take a different path, but there has only ever been one exit and it might not exist long enough now to validate any dawdling.

But Ienzo can't make himself charge through anymore, sidles along the box walls, inching here and there over the protruding limb of a standing mirror, a footed chair. He takes a sharp right and then another left, moving closer silently to the head of the stairs, where is father is undoubtedly now standing, sniffing deeply once and then again as if he is searching for the scent of rotting food—or a disinterred body maybe; maybe he thinks Ienzo's mother has gone that far, to sneak their son's corpse back into the house and try in her own desperate way to bring it back to breathing again. Well, the truth is not so different. Or any better.

Ienzo is half way across the room, sandwiched between a crate full of old slides and slide-making equipment and a huge file of paper, probably from his father's work, gathering moth larvae and wood-boring beetles. Ienzo is half way across the room when it happens, when down the stairwell far beyond his father he hears the door to the attic slam closed, hears the key grating in the lock, hears the pins fall into place again.

The door is locked. His mother has locked the door, locked the door with his father still forcing himself into the space, leaning over to avoid brushing his head against the cobwebbed and nail-studded ceiling. He is locked in with his father—and his mother, on the outside, can't have done so by accident.

A bolt like the blow from a broad sword seems to split his head in two, sets his ears to ringing and his heart jerks to a dead stop from its racing.

_Is she going to ever open it again?_

Suddenly it makes sense that she was caught now of all times, suddenly it makes sense that she fought his father, denied and goaded him in a way she would never have considered doing in her right mind. Now it made sense all those times she had not said _I love you_ back because maybe after all this she couldn't.

He might as well have stolen reality from her. His father traded the illusions in for _peace_ she never could. They were free and she was trapped.

Ienzo is trapped in the dark dusty space behind a foot-thick door, behind metal hinges twice as thick around as his wrists, behind a lock so heavy he couldn't have picked it even with the perfect equipment. If she never returns… if she never…

At the top of the stairs, Ienzo hears his father spit out a curse—at himself, at his wife, at Ienzo, at anything—and throw himself back down to the stairs, taking them three at a time and slamming into the door as his stopping point on the way down. The door does not even rattle beneath his weight.

Ienzo's father curses again, begins to pound at the wood with the balled fleshy sides of his fists. "Dahlia, let me out. Unlock the door right now!"

There's no answer from the other side, not even to Ienzo's uncontainable imagination. There's no shuffling of feet or a sigh to latch onto. It's like the hallway behind is simply dead. If his mother is still in it, she might as well have become a ghost. They might all be really: all ghosts in a sealed house, no one knowing where they have gone to, no one caring on the outside for anyone except his father, and when they come to knock on the doors well they'll all be locked they'll all be locked and they'll have to pry and pry and inside they'll find three whole bodies or if Ienzo's magic lasts after he does, they might just find nothing at all.

For a long moment, curled beside a crate, listening to his father pound on the immovable wood and his mother be anything but there, Ienzo wonders whether being nothing at all might finally, finally be preferable to the ruin he currently is. If he were only dead or selfless in the way that means he has no self then he wouldn't be able to fear this or the monsters in the streets and no guilt like a massive throat closing dark and thick around him throat muscle writhing him down into the final pit of dissolution if only he had really died then his father would not be here trapped and trapped behind the veil of his own senses. And his mother—

His mother would not be before the embers of the fire, free, even now maybe laughing. Even now maybe laughing and if he can free her more, then good, good but please not in this way, not quietly wasting in the dark because he _will_ die. He will die if she never opens the door, no source of water here no food and his stomach already peeling away at its own lining and the closeness of it all the pressing everything that moves moving beyond his sight and control and his father in the black soon he will stop shouting.

Not this way, slow and jet black, the memories made alive again pressing up against him, a skin outside his skin. Not this way, completely alone.

He has to get to the door. He has to get to the door even if it does nothing, has to plead, add his voice to his father's because she's the only one who can still hear them both maybe and maybe that will move her in ways nothing does anymore. He pushes forward out from beyond the crates and keeps crawling almost on his hands and knees now along the jagged saddle-backed track of his own choosing—well if he could get over the high stacks of boxes he would, but there's no air to breathe between them and the ceiling falling down around his head—

All the while his father beats against the door, shouting devolved into obscenities, and any minute he also will surrender. Except he is strong enough that if he tries maybe he can find something in the dusty remnants to pick the lock or smash the wood, prise at least enough to break the knob down and slip them both free. Yes, in his right mind his father might free them both, but who in Ienzo's life has had a right mind since that winter, since then when they sailed a straight course into the superior mirage and like a ship in the ghost lines drifted back to shore entirely devoid of crew? What right minds? No counting on it.

He doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to die like this right now, not yet, not here and this one thought consumes him, sets his heart again breaking against the smooth wells of his ribs inside his chest he can feel his throat closing in degrees so that air must worm its way through back and forth writhing through the narrowing space and in seconds spots of black blacker than even the lightless cavern of the attic sparkle like stars across the galaxy of his sight.

_Do not panic_ but that's useless advice in the face of reality (who is he fooling anymore?) and, at last, he abandons all pretense of silence or calm and begins to frantically run. He abandons all logic and sense and all attempts at secrecy as well, so that his steps echo like foghorns in the night and his breath comes ragged and loud over his wavering tongue and even at one point he might be calling out _Mother Mother don't why Mother don't _because it doesn't matter no one will hear no one will notice_ why_

He doesn't want to die invisible. He doesn't want to die alone.

His foot catches on a box, catches on some portrait album of their earlier lives at one point precious now forgotten and unwanted clutter much like him (consigned), and he plunges to the floor, scraping his knees and stinging his palms on the unsmoothed stones, grit entering the skin of the heels of his hands like unwelcome visitors pushing their way in through the front door. It stings, but that's nothing to what he has already felt, been feeling, will feel. What really strikes him is the silence afterward, the sharp dead silence like the whole world inhaling and holding it or dead and _not this way please_ he doesn't want to be _alone_—

"Who's there?" his father calls out. And the dead silence is his father's fists steady on the door, no longer beating, no long shouting. In the claustrophobic black space, Ienzo ceases to breathe.

There's a sound from the foot of the stair, and then a body turning, and on the floor Ienzo cannot pick himself up, cannot move, only braces on his hands and knees, all his body close together as his father begins to climb.

For a long moment, Ienzo cannot decide what to do, perceives no options at all which feel appealing and he knows that no choice is predictable or good here, but if it was _him _that his father heard—if it was him that was heard at last, then he is not he will not be alone—his heart in his chest swings like the head of a nervous serpent ready to strike, to unfold, and he finds his voice at last, trembling and dry and disused and tiny, but he makes it shout, "Father, it's me! I'm here!" and then a half second later because it feels necessary he adds, "It's Ienzo. Ienzo." It feels wonderful to say his name after all this time but afterward a vein of alkaline turns his stomach, because there is still more silence and no moving, and maybe his father hasn't heard him at all. Maybe all he heard was some far off scurrying of mice or wind.

Then his father gasps and takes the stairs two at the time Ienzo judges by the sounds of his boots, and then he stops at the head of the stair bent almost double to fit in the narrow space of the attic and he just inhales again and again for a long while like he can scent Ienzo out, like a sporthunterapexpredator devourer in search of the most elusive prey, and Ienzo wonders for a moment if he has made all the wrong choices, most especially this one.

His father makes a sound that is not chuckling and is not scoffing but somehow expresses them both, somehow is bleak and macabre amusement and utter, glacial disdain all at once and agony and rage beside them in equal doses. "What _have_ you been hiding, Dahlia?" he drawls, but even as he does so, it's painful and obvious that he doesn't believe a word he is saying anymore. Against his will, Ienzo's body curls in closer, so that his head meets the shivering lines of his forearms, and he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that he has been heard but that that will not, will not be helping him tonight.

"Who are you?" his father demands in the dark. "Who are you this time?"

Ienzo doesn't understand. Doesn't understand why now, of all times, the spell on his father would break except—

(he'd rather be a burden then a ghost and he'd rather die unwanted than unnoticed rather face this with someone anyone even if he's done nothing but ruin every dream they ever had and _please Father just please I am here please I am_)

—doesn't understand what his father's words mean, or why the man crouches at the top of the stairs not getting any closer, not calling out "How can you be my son?" not even "He's dead, my son is dead so you cannot be him!" There's nothing like that, nothing at all, just his father waiting for some answer that Ienzo does not know how to give and he hates this, hates surprise quizzes can't give the right answer if the right answer can't be found in books, hasn't been taught to him—

"So I _am_ dreaming again," his father says after a long beat, half contemplative, and Ienzo still doesn't quite follow (well, no, he follows but can't bring himself to like what he hears, is his father really saying what Ienzo thinks he is)— "Just dreaming." His father grunts but it sounds more like a voice, more like _How reassuring. For a moment I was actually concerned_. than anything like disinterest.

Ienzo is the one concerned. Ienzo knows best of all that the things which happen in dreams are inconsequential. They do not matter, illusions do not matter, and so you might do whatever you like to them, you might use all your power to make them vanish or extort every ounce of whatever it is you desire from their life's blood, because in the end they always _vanish_.

He is not a dream. He wants to tell his father that but he also does not want to be a liar and who knows anymore which parts are which.

(But he certainly does not want to vanish, and that is one definitive form of the truth.)

"Well," his father says, and there's another shifting so the man is almost on his knees maybe, his back a dark arch, the line of his hair over his spine not unlike brain stem writhing, his mouth open and hued, his hands half extended, silvering talons on stone. Ienzo has been here before; he might also be sleeping. "Well I know how to deal with this kind of nightmare," his father reassures. "I know."

The man begins to move, a slow, inexorable forward march through the maze, skittering nails against the cardboard, against the old wood and metal and dust silver fabric of the remnants of their happier life, moving forward and forward toward where Ienzo waits.

He wants to cry out again. He wants to cry out again and tell the truth as he knows it which is that he is living, still living, not an illusion of his own right yet, just a little faded at the edges, just a little untrustworthy, but mostly, for the moment, still there, still willing to sit at his father's feet listening to the virtues of a strong supply line, the virtues of a tactical leader, the best laid plans, and always agreeing, if only his father would please let him exist please let him be there anymore _please_.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," the white curve of teeth in the dark demands.

Ienzo cannot move, _knows_ that he will be seen if his father finds him (because, for the first time in a long time, for a moment, he really wanted to be seen, really wanted to be a part of his father's life again and look how that is turning out, look how all of this will turn out now). He does not want to be found but he still can't control it, still can't make himself invisible on command or even just quiet enough not to be noticed, and if his father finds him, well, won't he try to put a stop to all this madness, won't he try to end it?

Ienzo is the source of the illusion. Is, for his father, all the illusion ever was. What happens in dreams has no meaning, and so, sometimes, it is okay in your sleep to kill the ones you love.

He will not die a slow death if his father finds him. But the pain might be no less real.

He is in the maze of his own making in the realm of his own control and he knows it better than his father certainly, but the man has strength in his favor and disregard and fanaticism, and Ienzo can't even think anymore, can't remember the best corners to hide in, the most secret curves he has designed. He only knows that somewhere here is the metal dress form, the cage of which can fall around him like a guardian force like everything solid and protective in her skirts, like before.

He claws his way to his feet, still trembling so violently his legs waver beneath him. He begins to stagger a slow way along, further and further from his father's solid steps behind.

Back behind and to his left somewhere, on the other side of one stack of boxes, comes the familiar sound of his father's fist tapping on the walls separating them, the fluid rolling of his wrist, the hard bone lines of his fingers taut against an unyielding surface and the sound is everywhere in the room, shuddering.

The grandfather clock they don't own is ringing and his father's hand is the second hand in motion. Ienzo hears the noise pass above him, actually above him, and he holds his breath, fights to stifle his own shivering so that there will not even be movement in the particles of air around him. His father is just on the other side of this wall of boxes, and if Ienzo does not move, a single turn might bring them face to face, might reveal him after all this time and there will nothing to stop his father from lashing out at the face of all his woe, at the face in all his nightmares, at the child he just knows he buried good and dead in the ground—

The moment the sound is past, Ienzo scurries along, his bare feet blessedly gliding along the stone floor in silence. He turns away from the path his father is taking and backtracks. Maybe if he can get around toward the window right behind the dress form he can knock it out and—

The even, steady pacing of feet and the solemn knocking of the fist never stops. Ienzo feels it like the point of a sword against the nape of his neck.

"Let's not play games tonight," his father insists to what he believes is a nightmare. What is his nightmare and he doesn't even know it anymore. "I am certainly not in the mood."

Ienzo has never been the kind to play childish games, least of all now.

He pushes around old crinolines, and, straight on the other end of the attic, he sees his mother's abandoned mannequin, half crooked, open at the bottom only far enough to admit his small body, the metal wiring of the cage inviting as ever the delicate weft of her dresses had been. Back lit by the dirty window behind it, it blurs, beacons. He drags himself forward, over a protruding sack of old belts, over the last traces of his mother's blue period, all the silk cornflowers strewn out across the path. He doesn't dare to run but he wants to.

Ienzo slides beneath the form's metal prongs finally. He crushes himself in behind the solid pole keeping it all aloft like this thin barrier might protect him. At the far end of the attic, his father turns the corner. He's a dark, doubled-over figure, claws first, resolute and unstoppable in approaching.

The pointed beads of the Midnight Anklet sink into his foot and all he can think is _she lied_.

_I'm not afraid of the dark_—

Ienzo forces his body to freeze, wills his father not to see him and wants to laugh at the irony, wants to laugh period all hysterical and around a mouthful of tears—irony not because he wants to be invisible now that he finally can be seen, or even that being seen will be the final tool to making him really and truly invisible at last, but because even as he prays to go unnoticed, in reality, it must be that somewhere underneath this surface he _wants_ to be seen. Because the illusion of nonexistence isn't coming back. Even now, he must want to be verified and validated. No, he doesn't know what he wants anymore. His father is closer and closer.

Ienzo's head swims, every inhalation drawn silent through the straw-like shutter of his throat. He watches with one unblinking eye as his father's hunched form becomes the roughened edges of boots looming, almost touching the metal dress form, and the lightless air is all that separates them. His father lingers there at the end of the row; Ienzo can't even bring himself to close his eyes: he needs to be present for the moment in which his father might finally discover him again for the first time in six months, needs to know if there will be any flash of old recognition, of fondness—if something in his father's face will go soft at last at the thought of him living, like the tenderness of his hands in the copy's hair. Or maybe what Ienzo really wants to see is whether or not all that is gone, desperation or desire for one singular normality the only thing left.

Deep under the frantic tautness of his shoulders, Ienzo almost hopes their eyes do meet, but then his father is moving again, turning away to the right and disappearing around an unused canvas and easel. The mechanical thudding of his boots fades out to nothing, but Ienzo had read too many Gothic stories like this to even think of moving. Not without promise, not without security, not without certainty, none of which Ienzo has had in a long time.

But also he is human, and when there is no sound for a long stretch of time, he is tempted to move, to extricate himself and find something to break the window near his back, even if that means jumping...

Slow as fish in a still pond, he unfurls, hands meeting the floor stones, bare feet sliding out from underneath him. The Midnight Anklet scrapes on the floor and Ienzo panics for a moment but there's no answering noise. He makes it around the dress form's metal base without more mishap, and, turning on to his back to pass under the wire cage, he pushes himself half free. The back of his shirt catches on the wire edges though, and when he tries to free himself, there's a harsh twanging of metal on metal, a low-pitched long sound that seems to ring and ring and then—

"Found you," his father's voice leaks through the crevice between two cartons, the next row up, but there might as well be nothing between them; there's a fierce shove and everything is crashing down around him, a flurry of papers, glass shattering, a chair topples half over him; the dress cage slides sideways and traps his legs under it. An explosion of old, pressed military shirts suffocating up around his face on the floor and he doesn't have time to blink before his father's hands close around his shoulders.

Heedless of Ienzo's trapped position, his father rips him free of the refuse memories, blunt-edged metal scoring livid tears down the legs of his pants, down the backs of his knees. Ienzo cries out, the sharp shock of pain and discovery and fear and sadness and care all at once.

"It's me!" he says, tries to say. "It's me." And with the cold vices of the man's hands still bruising his upper arms, Ienzo looks up and meets his father's eyes.

Only there's nothing there. Nothing there, just two eyes with no meaning and no specificity, filled by neither wrath nor joy nor regret. There is not even recognition, not even focus, like looking into the open eyes of an automatic blinking doll, a sleepwalker far away thinking. He stares at Ienzo—_at_, not through—but still he doesn't _see_ him or anything but artifactual remnants of a failed endeavor. Ienzo braces, but for what, he doesn't know.

Pupils wide and wider so Ienzo can see that they really are just two holes, his father leans forward so he half surrounds him, and loosens his hold on Ienzo's shoulders, lifts his hands up to cup Ienzo's cheeks. "If only," he says, and that is all. _If only_. The proper conclusion to which might be any wistful number of things but most especially _he did not exist_. His father's touch on his face is achingly light, tentative, exalting, the way he might hold a very old thing which never belonged to him. He traces the thin lines of Ienzo's brows, under the tangled fall of his bangs, thumbs tear-trailing from Ienzo's temples to his chin, where he slowly, barely tilts Ienzo's head to one side and then the other, inspecting or memorizing.

His father's hands fall slack to his collar (to his throat), rest there weightless and unassuming. Ienzo trembles.

"Can you imagine how _sick_ I am of this kind of dream?" His father's hands tighten, not a grip (not yet), just reflexive motion, and below his vacant look his mouth is an untrustworthy arbiter of his expression, turned up but full of teeth. His voice a pendulum swinging, half choked. "Every single night when I go to look for him all I find is _you_. Nothing but smoke and mirrors wrapped up like I should believe it but the moment I catch hold—" his hands tighten, tighten, "—it's gone. It's all gone all over again, light slipping out through my fingers—every single night he's _there_ and I can't reach him. I can put my hands on him but he doesn't come home because he's never coming back.

"He's_ never_ coming back, do you see?" He shakes Ienzo, only enough to elicit a response but Ienzo can't think of anything safe, can't think of anything except that he knows what is next.

The man says, "You're not him."

"I am," Ienzo manages. And "This is not a dream."

"Why are you doing this to me?" his father replies, rhetorical and agonized and his _father_ and suddenly it is the hot, dark night six months ago in the room wet with mirage-blood his mother on her knees begging for some palatable answer _Why are you doing this why are you doing this why are you_—and Ienzo flinches away, meets the solid wall of his father's fingers against the back of his neck, unyielding.

"Every night knowing he won't be back in his room when I wake. Every morning looking at the empty place where he was. Every—single—dream ends in a disappearing act." In the snow a year ago now his legs beneath him invisible there but gone his hands gone his heart pumping blood he can't verify his father's eyes moving over him never on him just beyond meaningless _that_ _he didn't exist we should wish that we should_—

"You're nothing but a cheap imitation in the back of my head. You're here to guilt me, aren't you? Here to torture me again and again like I _wanted_ him to die. Like I _wanted_ to bury my only child. So that when you disappear tonight the wound will open up all over again. But you can't fool me. I did bury him. I've _made_ my peace. So go on, imposter," closer, quieter, conspiratorial, "disappear."

His father's hands close and close, the noose trap on the neck of the furbearer, steel teeth sealing the open column of Ienzo's throat until he can feel every artery, every pathway shutting down in degrees, a bright band of pain like a sheet driven between his body and his mind everything pressed inward and inward and the blood beats in his ears. In his ears beating and the blood below his father's hands also beating two separate halves of a system _on a normal planar representation the lines of a star polygon begin at a single vertex and proceed until the same vertex is reached but not surpassed_ and the black holes sparking before his eyes are hypoxemia or hypoxia or he doesn't know anymore just the lancing pain just the pressing in his father's knuckles over the bottom edges of his brain over the vertebral rise of his spinal column grinding down and in the dark stars fireworking on his vision to coalesce to blindness or blind panic.

Somewhere a clock is ringing that they never had _the rays of the polygon self-intersect two times at the base pentagram forming a series of open mouth vertices _and he doesn't feel his fingers anymore but they are jerking toothing at his father's flesh his close trimmed nails clawing no dissuasion no help even splitting the skin the man doesn't feel it or he doesn't feel anything anymore his eyes turning inside out looking inward despite meeting somewhere above Ienzo's own two cut lines of communication nothing going in or out. Ienzo coughs, kicks out instinctively even as he feels his own legs buckling beneath him, the raised vice of his father's hands the only thing keeping him standing and fighting does nothing, could never have done: his father is invincible as always which from the time before Ienzo could think almost he knew.

His father's face is determined or impassive no difference looking over him not at him and Ienzo cannot breathe. _Cannotbreathe_ nothing going in and yet everything in and in and in and inside he feels as if something wants to break solid flexing like a bone in his throat _hyoid_ he means to think doesn't make it around the white phosphorescent burning of the dead blood in his neck on either side the split his whole body seizing his lungs in his chest beating better than the stutter empty chambering of his heart and he wants to cry out or just cry but can't even. Can't. Was he ever conscious?

"Get back in the grave where you belong." His father voice like a thing not from his body. Maybe not from his body. Ienzo can't see his lips move or see at all anymore the shades closed and closing still.

At a little beyond eight years old, in early winter again, Ienzo Amaryllis comes to the immutable realization that he is going to die.

This should be the moment he finally surrenders. But it isn't. This should be the moment when he lets his hands fall like two stone weights, when he closes his eyes for the last time because if there was ever someone with less to live for, he has not heard of them. But it isn't. He can't push any harder back against and his face is a hemorrhaged cloud of bruises and his flesh fills the grooves in his father's fingers but everywhere under his skin there is a cold, electric tingling.

But everything under his skin shivers down to the sinew, coiled wire tight around his bones, and somewhere the clock has stopped chiming and for a moment over the blood rushing like wings of a massive bird in his ears all Ienzo hears is his father's harsh breathing and he doesn't think, not really, except that he preferred the last time, the last time in the snow with the monster half-bowed over him also breathing open mouthed and eager over the monster fangs the monster tongue; his whole body stings down at the bone collapsing bloodless devoured, yes, preferred the monster—

From behind them in the dark there is a brutal, animal sound familiar from every nightmare Ienzo has had since last winter. His father's hands loosen and Ienzo goes slack against backward against the dress form, not free enough from his father's grip to fall yet, the curved band of fingers still hooked under Ienzo's jaw so that the weight of his body distends his neck with an agonizing flash of pain through his skull. He breathes in heaving gasps. His head swims; everything shakes.

Behind them, over a low plume of boxes, a deep muscle-red shape is moving, a coalition of muscles under flesh so tight even in the dim he can see the rope slither of the tendons under sleek fur bunching at the joints. The tentacle extension of its skull streams like a banner, and the monster slinks across the surface of the low pile of boxes, the whole mess beneath it precariously shaking but not falling. When it reaches the end of the formation, a single nonchalant leap brings it in line with them both, ten feet from them or closer, and now it is behind his father so that Ienzo cannot even try to follow it with his swollen, bleary eyes.

He knows it isn't real. Not this time, not here for no reason, no way in or out. It's memory, memory and nothing more, but the sound of its wet scenting worms in his ears over the constant tinnitus as paced and deliberate as any real breathing, counterpoint to his panting.

His father's head turns, the barest curvature of his spine so that he might look over his shoulder, and he doesn't let go of Ienzo even when he finally lays eyes on the monster. Ienzo can't tell what is going on, feels the forceful temptation to give into unconsciousness—but this monster is one of his own making, and he doesn't know what will happen, what it will become, if he is not there to witness. Except he doesn't know what he is witnessing now and his father agrees, turns back around to face Ienzo with not even a frown on his passionless face, because they both lived in the nightmare long enough to remember Ienzo's monsters look but do not touch. They are illusions but not weapons.

Behind them, the monster warning-growls, a low frequency splitting of air atoms or something inside him that makes Ienzo feel he is opening and opening backward into the snow a year ago, the wet yellow rims of its eyes from the alley circling closer and closer, the red extension of its mouth spreading, the sound of its feet on the road the exact same as the sound now, striking like flint on the stone floor as it moves nearer and still nearer.

Then: What if it is not his? What if it is real, can feed, can roar? His heart fails. His ragged thoughts shudder to a stop. The problem is he makes things real. Or almost.

His father's face remains idle rigging on the frame of his skull, fastened shut and bound. He says, "It's been a while," back toward the monster in some stiff, ironic voice. It's nuance lost on Ienzo in the moment, who hears only the ranged, metallic striking of the claws first in one ear and then the other as if the monster is pacing (only until it decides from which angle to leap).

His father's hands begin to tighten again. Had they never been interrupted. And anticipation of agony makes every inch within Ienzo jump, all nerves sparking systemic through pathways around his heart and laboring lungs he did not think he had—pressure ready to split all his throat in two again _not again please not someone help someone_ and the world is his wet choking for a moment, then. _help me_.

Ienzo feels more than sees the impact, the muscled coil of tonnage lunging toward them at untraceable speed, two paws large as his head tearing at the backs of his father's arms; the massive jaws which appear above his father's shoulders are not unlike a shark's throat in the sea, wide and wider, and Ienzo sees nothing but yellow moon teeth closing (hands closing like his own hands closing) and the scarlet writhing tongue before his father is torn away, thrown down, dragged back across the floor in a single, fluid movement with blood on his neck in a pattern like cornflowers. The monster bites down again.

_Not real_, Ienzo says, tries to, finds his own throat nonfunctional; without the support of his father's vice hands, his legs crumble underneath him and he slumps on the floor still struggling to breathe. It's not real but like eyes all other senses can be deceived and there's sounds like something breaking and bone-white terror anguish on his father's writhing face—he cannot die of illusory wounds but his mind believes and so he _feels_ them—feels every pinprick of the bone-splitting pressure of the cat or canine's teeth scissor-shutting, not splitting but tearing the flesh, excising arteries, the mass of red tissue slick through crushing. The jagged exposure.

Air entering where there should be none. Ienzo says _Not real_. His father kicks and the weight of the compressing mouth swallows any screaming, half the blood inside down inside where it does not belong gurgling spitting he must be making some noise but Ienzo cannot hear it the chapel bells in the wind distant ringing and under the fleshy _srrp srrp_ing of his father's infrequent hard fought breaths he claws at the monster face above him fingers boring where jaundice eyes should be but not real or misplaced or immune and the monster doesn't flinch doesn't let go even with his father's knee convulsing against its rib cage—

Ienzo's eyes are wet or damaged so the world also bleeds into mute shapes, unfocused colors, the hole in his father's throat sangria velvet, the weakening shift of his father's hands against its forelegs a cotton white. Its head right-angle twists the skin; the corded stem of its brain lashes behind it in a cracking, erratic glee. His father's kicking falters. His hands fall ashed and barely trembling. He manages some noise in no language but the infantile, numb-mindless humming the white-eyed moan. He should be dead. He knows it.

It's just illusion, yes, Ienzo knows that too, but that doesn't mean he can move.

The monster drops his father's head back with a tender slowness, licks over the blurred wound. Ienzo can't focus but knows it is stepping back, and it makes him cruel and caught both that he only thinks _not me_. It sniffs once over the cotton moth white of his father's face and then it moves—moves back _not me_ its eyes low to the floor, fading at the edges a sanguine moveable fountain dripping out just color—it bows, steps over his father or on him or through him and seems to fold into the edges of Ienzo's vision going soft and black there's just the true red of its mouth the fat tissue yellow of teeth—fabric ripping—his father's haze body shudders maybe then is open maybe_ open_ the cat's face inside maybe there's a sound dull stretching pulled ropes the monster leans back trailing slickness his father makes noises not a human being but maybe still prayers. Ienzo cannot see will not _please_ except that on the white bed of papers over the floor on the grey floor itself there are pieces no longer inside a body that should be red flowering flung down thick unattended.

The monster chews. His father's eyes half-lidded (corpsing), but still living, survey the hole in his abdomen over the exposed white rise of one rib not even disbelieving anymore just wondering somewhere far away why his brain won't_ let_ him die and then there is a steady, slow, and terrible tapping, perfect echo to his father's fist on the divan which is actually his skull on the floor tipping back lifting dropping his skull on the stone floor again again—

Not even disbelieving anymore, all of them just so long caught up in the fantasy (not sure not willing to risk not being sure_) where is the past from here where is the future is there beyond this anything beyond this some moment of waking_ well Ienzo only wants to know what is and what isn't—"_It's not real!_" Ienzo finds his voice at last to scream. "This isn't real!" and of this he is certain at least of this he must be certain there is no other option no other instance no moment he would want this his father a wound hole his own mouth bloody (might as well be) so none of it, none of it, none of it has even happened. Or will _ever_. _The truth_.

The monster dissolves. Dissolves completely, becomes grains of colored dust that disperse until there is nothing left at all, only the grave quiet of the attic, the overturned boxes, his father lying on his back on the floor—but in one piece, no bite marks, no open stomach cavity.

But his father's face is still contorted, phantom pains from every inch no recovery, half on his side now with his arms not moving his legs not moving the narrow rise and fall of his chest nothing else except lifting and dropping his head dropping and dropping his temple on the stones already discolored the same measured beating of his fist on the divan a _knock_ and a _knock_ and a _knock _but visceral (_thhk_ _thhk_ _thhk_): his head flesh and bone not ever pausing and eventually the man begins to laugh.

His father giggles one continuous exhalation beating his own skull on the floor half-open-eyed but still not seeing. "Time to wake up," he says and says. "It's time to wake up now."

Ienzo leans against his mother's dress form, tilts his own head back to stare at the dark beams of the roof. Just staring like an aftermath already, long and slow. He doesn't feel so much as _is_ empty, no introspection anymore, no thinking, only a miniature machine for perception, a miniature set of eyesearstonguefingers groping in the crevices of the floor, sliding down along the way. An existence prolonged beyond all sense of meaning.

It is hours or minutes before his father stops laughing. Stops moving all at once, his body no longer resounding with the fall of his head, his neck no longer lifting the heavy weight of his skull to brain himself. When Ienzo looks over, his own neck a stone block unmoving, his father's face is worn raw (not bloody, just not real skin anymore), and every inch is slack, his mouth almost open against the floor. There's no noise from him, no flicker of a glassed-over eye; there's only a scent, low and late, something gaseous or rotten like bodily refuse or like the monster's mouth last winter in the snow: a dead thing.

A dead thing. And this the part where Ienzo should care, where he should cry or wallow in the guilt or just scream and keep screaming until he has no voice anymore, but his head and body feel eons apart, his skin nothing but a stifling blanket thrown over the shrinking confines of his heart. He looks at his father gone before him (_not suicide murder it was not him it was me_) and for once, blessedly, feels nothing at all except shock, a smoke sort of grey inside his mind swirling. Dream-like and meaningless.

A long time later he stands, takes one uneven step and then a steadier second, bare-foot sliding over the spilled papers away from his father's body, no destination in mind really, only _away_ from the corpse smell sticking to his tongue. He finds himself at the head of the attic stairs without knowing how he got there, looking down into the dark stairwell and the darker face of the sealed door at the bottom.

He doesn't remember ever going down the stairs, but he remembers looking eye-to-eye with the keyhole and seeing nothing but pitch on the other side, hearing nothing but his hand useless turning on the knob, and, of course, it still won't open.

Then he hears himself speak but doesn't recall speaking, isn't his voice anyway, just something that sits colorless in the air: "Mother, Father is dead now. Can I please come out?"

She never answers.

Who knows how long he stands behind the door waiting, only that when he climbs back up the stairs again, his hands are sore from the repetitive knocking, his voice has gone from hoarse to nonexistent calling out. The attic is still stone quiet though less dark, a barely perceptible lightening of the gloom from the sides of the room inward. Either it is early morning or just past dawn; he can't care.

Without any genuine thoughts forming against the inside of his skull it occurs to Ienzo that he will need a coat, that he will need shoes. The only place to go now is _out_. But he outgrew his old shoes months ago and she was never given the money to buy new ones and he hasn't needed them really, hasn't put half a foot outside since last winter when he became a prisoner at first of his own choosing because in the hard shadow of his father and the Gaussian domesticity of his mother he had been safe, for a while, from monsters. Had been safe until he brought their images inside (became).

He squirms between rows of boxes and stumbles over the jutting forms of old curtain rods. When he finally reaches it, the temptation to lay down in his makeshift bed is almost ravenous, all-consuming, and he wavers for a moment looking at the old great coat he had preferred to a blanket, weighing the work of pulling it on against curling up underneath it, his face buried too so that nothing might enter, no rot, no light.

He picks it up, sluggishly pulls it around and around and does up the highest clasp although that barely keeps it clinging to the edges of his shoulders. He has to hold it, himself inside it, to keep it on or close.

A statement on his need for control that—even now when everything else inside his head has tumbled into the same howling wind tunnel of thought and fear and other feeling just beneath the surface—he remembers somewhere in the right corner of the attic is a box of his father's old dress shoes. And near the place where his father is (was) that old sack of leather belts still firm enough to bind together, strong enough to bear his weight times over…

He dusts a house spider off one pair of shoes and puts them on, laces them as tight as he can. They still clunk and slap loose against the floor, intermittently press the Midnight Anklet sharp against his skin and slipping under his soles already sweating against the leather without socks. Tight enough, at least, to last.

(Only to last how long he does not know, has not thought about, might never think about now. He has to go, but isn't conscious enough to decide _where_.)

The belts are where he left them, his mother's careful arraignment by size maintained, and with numb fingers he strings them together, holes of one through the buckle of another until they are a chain, snapped firm under his tugging.

Then there is a moment's hesitation, something inside above the bound, gagged rest making its screams at last heard _not there not there not again there_ but it's a small voice (child's), worthless; he stands, worms his way back across the attic to the window he knows he can reach, trailing coat tails and rope. He passes his father's body and even without looking down he can still see it monster-torn, bitten and wet, the old coat and the old shoes and the old belts like the cast-off skin brought back and greedy for the blood and flesh that once filled them, absorbing, assuming the liquid hue—this also is not real but who cares anymore?

Ienzo tips the dress form over with a half shove more violent and steady than he has any right to be at the moment, doesn't know where the strength to move at all is coming from. He watches the shape of his mother tumble over with a harsh, resonant clanging and equal amounts of dispassion. Struggling with it, with the things packed in behind, he pushes until one of its firm metal legs finally rests against the frosted glass of the attic window.

One shove forward on the shoulders of the dress form makes the window lightly shiver, metal on glass an unassuming scraping. Ienzo doesn't wait for it to settle before he pushes with against the dress form again all the weight he can muster. And then again and again.

The principle is as simple as playground mechanics, the arc of the swing rising and rising, and he recites in his head the full text of one physics lecture or another because it fills space that otherwise would be left free_ potential energy builds up within the medium which upon contact transfers as transformed kinetic force_ the window shakes under the repeated pressure of the metal strut, and then, without forewarning, cracks open.

The first piece comes free, falls out and hits the street below with a muffled, tinkling shatter. A cold gust of air rushes in the opening. It is winter. Somewhere he knew that, had known that, only he had forgotten.

A half-hearted sideways push on the dress form breaks out the rest of the window, lets in a swift flurry of the snow gathered up on the window ledge. Ienzo hooks the buckle at one end of the belt rope over the top leg of the mannequin. The whole base is too wide to fit through the window, he can see. It will hold in place inside. Long enough. (To reach the ground. But then what? Then?)

The other long end of the rope goes through the belt loops of his trousers—it is his father's, goes all the way around Ienzo's waist and back out around, so he can pull it through the buckle too and pile hitch it.

Testing the edges of the window for any remaining shards of glass with the soles of his father's old shoes, Ienzo puts first one leg and then the other out the half moon window, over the barest ledge. The frigid air flashes against his skin, over the cooling glass beads of his anklet. He catches his strung-together rope tight between his hands and shifts farther backward, stopped on the edge of the tipping point, the half weightless moment between crawling back into what he has always known as safety and plunging down into what might be the waiting mouth of the monster still, red and reeking and real.

_It's a ward against Darkness_ and he'd say she lied but the truth is he is still living.

_ I am not afraid of the dark_ and he'd say he lied.

He hesitates, head near the floor, hands tangled, looking back over his father's body permanently still just indistinct black rises in the dark and he can't see the ground below either, didn't even pause to look; outside was where it started (fearing) and not even where it will end—_my father I hurt them I hurt them I ruined I did Ienzo did it all a dream still dreaming_ some shuddering thing inside him a familiar voice but far away that needs to stay away right now. (He needs to not be right now.)

So he just moves, slides backward through the window and his feet catch on the stone wall and the rope holds tight on his waist even though his wrists are too weak to do the full work of holding. For a moment he is falling backward through the grey pre-dawn overhead the stars blurring out _ten angles opening ten vertices always equal measures always one answer just one answer_ and then the bottom of one too-large shoe scrapes the ground and he feels himself reach out, undo the rope, drop to his knees, boneless and frozen but somehow still breathing.

It's another immeasurable stretch of time before he can stand, hands already half-blue from the chill and no snow falling but some gathered at every corner around the side of their house (not his, not anymore). He finally pulls his hands in close, lets the sleeves fall over them, and struggling free of the coat tails, begins to leave at last.

Compulsion or morbidity or something softer, piteous and young, makes him look back after he reaches the street, and for the first time in months, he looks in through the wide front window of their house where before there had been a garden. Now there is a real morning fire in hearth, the curtains undrawn, and backlit in soft oranges turned to copper in her hair his mother sits coyly on the edge of an armchair, blank-eyed and open-booked.

She leans over the low table between the divan and chair, carrying a teapot and a vacant, eager smile, talking rapidly to people who are not and never will be there. She pours tea for three. Listens to something. Laughs, easy.

And maybe this is the part it is supposed to come back (_lovehopeguiltdespaircomfort_). Maybe this is where he should start crying, where he should run back begging for their simple, radiant life—only it isn't.

This is the part where he walks away.

The part where the neighbors sleep behind their own closed doors unaware, outside, of the red death that passes, and he leaves his quiet, enclosing neighborhood without thinking a single real thought, without picking a direction or destination; he only goes.

It doesn't matter where he stops—he doesn't even notice he_ has_ stopped until there is a sound too near to him, and he discovers a high wall has materialized behind his back, that he is sitting on the ground hours (days?) later in some sector of the city he has never seen, his legs sprawled out sore before him, his head back against the wall, watching but not seeing curtains flap out an open window above him through the sun, bright-cold—then the near sound again, resolving itself into footsteps, closer:

"Hey, Ïsa, get a load of this!" Boyish. Obnoxious.

"No, you can't keep it."

Somewhere the first voice says something about blue eyes. Ienzo doesn't turn his head to look, but soon enough there is a blur of primary color in his face, just green waving back and forth, and he tries to focus for the first time since the red opening of his father in the attic. The shivering color becomes the rough underside of a mitten too close to his eyes, and when the hand is finally withdrawn, Ienzo's vision clears but the green stays, two eyes worth of glass chips or the hardest liquor locked in his father's cabinet, the one for the worst nights that his mother serves (served) with sugar and matches—

"Yah okay there?"

Ienzo doesn't answer. Not interested in people. Not even that they can actually see him, that they might be able to touch him or be something to him if he tried or let them try because he has been in that place before and it just ends in the dark. He looks down at his hands in his lap under the pooling, stolen sleeves.

"Aw, don't be like that," Green Eyes wheedles, another step closer, leaning a bit to try and look Ienzo in the face again.

"The name's Lea," he says. "Got it memorized?"

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Şŧσŗм : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**My-notes-are-getting-long-now-sorry:**

**1) **As ever, I apologize for the long time between updates. I normally try to avoid complaining, but this last year has been excruciating physically, creatively, and mentally, which the contents of this chapter might indicate. Hoping for a brighter 2013.

**2) Trivia:  
**― o **Last chapter** referenced W. B. Yeat's poem "The Song of the Happy Shepherd". Next to "The Masque of the Red Death," this poem had a huge hand in shaping TVR, so you should totally read it. Last chapter also referenced Joan Didion's _Slouching Toward Bethlehem_ (which is, in turn, a Yeats reference).

― o **This chapter** pulls a very famous line from which equally famous 1909 French horror novel? And: The entire last scene of this chapter is an homage to which (equally) famous modern horror novel by Stephen King?

**3) Regarding mysterious side characters: **I keep forgetting that not everyone in the KH fandom is in Final Fantasy or Disney fandoms, so I apologize if some of the characters who have popped up on the side have confused anyone. I'll make notes on them in the future. _For the lovely reviewer who brought this to my attention_: Laguna Loire from the last chapter (along with his friends Kiros and Ward) are from _Final Fantasy VIII_. In the original draft of chapter six, Ienzo's lawyer was actually Rebecca Cunningham, from _Disney's Tailspin_. But I wasn't confident about my characterization of her, so I changed a few traits and made her (mostly) an OC. _If anyone else is confused about a character, please just let me know!_

**4)** Two more amazing fans—**SisterofScarletDevil** and **Lil-Kiddy-K**—have drawn **crazy stunning fanart** for this fic. Hurry over to the link in my profile to coo all over their incredible and adorable art and show just how much their work is appreciated! (I'm still glowing about it, all these months later!)

**Please review, especially if you have this story on your favorites or alerts list!**


	11. Citadel

**Note:** To stave off any confusion right off the bat, this takes place before BBS. That is all.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

» Τђε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħą__ρτε__ŕ IV_

Ғāηŧąŝίą – Đεł – Şσġησ – ( Äηđąηŧε ) :

Ĉίŧąđεł

This chapter is dedicated to Azrael the Dark Archangel and Moonlight-is-Innocence.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

"Another two reports from Sector 3 this morning," Even says, voice a dry, suspicious whisper as if he already knows he is being overhead.

From the back corner of the room, Braig scoffs, taps his gun on one leg. "Just two? Kind of a down day!" Maybe it was meant to add a little levity to the bleak, cloistered air of the study, except this is Braig saying it, so just as likely not. Dilan shakes his head, crosses his arms a little tighter, and on his other side, Aeleus makes some vague noise of disapproval, his brow knit and the scowl across his face like a deep canyon. There's a moment of silence and then Master Ansem grips the dark edge of his desk, white-knuckled and grim, and he folds in on himself so much his age begins to show. Everyone politely refrains from commenting on how very tired he looks.

"We must increase patrols," the master says at last.

Dilan sighs like a wind in fall. "It isn't possible." And the crisp shapes of the words themselves in his learned accent reveal them to be no less than true. "We cannot leave this castle utterly unguarded nor draw back our forces holding off the Lunar Cry. We are pressed to our limits as it all stands."

A gun cocks. "Ah, come on! A little unpaid overtime never killed any cats." Braig's smile along the barrel of the arrowgun is sharp as a shot itself.

But Aeleus shakes his head. "We are too few. Even if we go together, we could guard less than a third of the Garden in a day. So long as we cannot predict where they will next strike—"

"And that is _precisely_ why you cannot go!" Even leans forward over the front of the desk to gesture wildly at a heaping stack of reports. "I am only capable of so much when lacking any resources for support! While you ruffians have been playing mercenary at the gates, the weight of our research has fallen entirely on me! What matter that we prevent invisible castle sieges if the Garden falls down around our ears because we abandoned our experiments as to the very _cause_ of our problems?"

"What matter that we find a cure for this infestation if we perish before we can employ it?" Dilan's violet gaze is even, testing, from the corner of his eye.

"Do your forget yourselves?" Even snarls, one palm pounding the front edge of the desk. "We are scientists, not soldiers!"

"Ah necessity, the mother of innovation." Dilan almost manages a smile, though his voice is droll.

Master Ansem has steepled his fingers before his face, and his eyes are shadowed. "Were that there was no need," he murmurs, muffled, into his hands. "Were a great many things not as they are today..."

Braig, coming around the desk at last in a creaking of leather and metal, adds a metallic laugh as well. "No joke. I'd sell some organs for a pack of SeeDs nowadays. Sorceress problems? Oops, canned your pesky Sorceress hunters. Smooth move!"

"There is no proof that a _Sorceress_ is to blame for the infusion—"

"The Lunar Cry has never been activated by anything but the Pandora," Dilan interrupts.

Beside him, Aeleus shifts, the movement of his large form enough to draw all eyes. "Even is right to be doubtful. We all know better than to blindly accept precedent when the data suggest something is amiss."

"Exactly!" Even sniffs. "The readings from the test subjects match none of the Garden OS records and the progression of the Cry is suspicious in and of itself—if there were, perhaps, some immense influx of dark power similar to a Sorceress's—"

"Conjecture." Dilan's lance scrapes the stone floor. "Hypotheses cannot stop our citizens from dying in the mouths of monsters now."

Even is shouting by now. "And putting no thought into these avenues will guarantee they _all_ die!" His hands are balled into fists and his coat slaps around his ankles as he turns to glare Dilan down.

"That is enough," the master cuts through, sitting back suddenly in his high-backed chair. Even's mouth closes audibly; Braig grins like a boy who has just watched his siblings scolded for a transgression he himself committed.

Aeleus breaks the moment of harsh quiet with another pointed question: "Nothing has been heard from Esthar?"

Master Ansem hesitates—rare—and frowns deeper, if that were possible. "A distress call from Esthar intended for Balamb Garden was intercepted at the front by General Sephiroth. General Farron reports the concentration of fiends in the Great Salt Lake area is too high to even consider a crossing, and the Odin unit, as you know, shies from nothing. We can only assume both Balamb and Esthar have fallen."

Braig whistles ominously, long and low.

"Then perhaps any efforts of ours might amount to nothing more than futility." The word, in Dilan's careful enunciation, rings in the room like a funeral bell.

"No." Master Ansem shakes his head and squares his shoulders. "So long as casualties are kept to the minimum, we must not panic. There is still time to find the source of this darkness."

"And what should be we tell the people?" Dilan responds, the proper formality in his word choice but a scathing note in his tone. "We cannot write every incident off as a rabid dog or a back alley mage's tricks gone wrong."

Braig laughs, head tipped back, eyes like slits. "Don't mind the spider's legs, ma'am, Fluffy's a rescue!"

Aeleus steps on Braig's foot and even the metal toe of the sharpshooter's boot isn't enough to keep him from flinching and smacking uselessly at Aeleus's side.

Dilan isn't finished. He stares, solemn-faced and coldly (but genuinely) concerned, down at Master Ansem where he sits. Dilan says, "Soon the people will realize their utopia is crumbling beneath their feet. And what then, when they have shed their _blissful _ignorance and all their faith in our ability to preserve it? How long until the blame for this sourceless evil falls squarely on our heads?"

"That," Even insists, "is subjective thought we cannot waste precious time pursuing."

Aeleus nods. "We must do what we can, as swiftly as it can be done."

Master Ansem touches one long hand to his temple, weighing each of the unpleasant options before he speaks. "We will decrease the guard on the castle. Aeleus, Braig and Dilan—only one of you will remain to guard the gates at a time. Even, you and I will continue to search out the cause of the monsters' presence, but first we will compile the data on all known attacks and search again for patterns in their manifestation. If we can develop even an inkling of where they will next attack, we can press our advantage."

It's the wisest solution to an unsolvable situation, the best of no good options. Everyone nods—there is little else than can be done. The silence after Master Ansem's decision is palpable and full of raging thoughts.

Even breaks the stalemate this time: "And what of the boy? I cannot continue to nanny after him and devote myself to vital research at the same time!"

"You do him a disservice to treat him that way," Aeleus answers. "He is a child, but no fool. Those who speak little, see much."

"Kettle, Pot. Pot, Kettle. Play nice now kiddies!" Braig is rolling his eyes—strange color, like long-dried orange peels—not brown or yellow or any other one, nameable shade.

"Has there been any improvement in his situation?" Master Ansem asks, speaking to Even still.

"Not in the slightest. He still will not speak more than a handful of words, and he has not showed so much as a hint of magical aptitude, despite what every test I have run seems to indicate!"

Dilan shakes his head, long hair rustling on his uniform. "With eyes that blue, it is impossible he does not possess a well-spring of magical capability."

"And yet, he refuses to show it! It has become infuriating as of late."

"Patience moves many a mountain coercion fails to lift," Aeleus says. "And I am more worried for the reactor."

There's a nervous beat in the conversation, and Ansem presses his hand harder against his temple. "The readings are stable. For now."

"But the fluctuations in water level remain unpredictable, and the downward trend continues. If the level of the Grand Lake falls much farther, our current system of pumps will no longer be sufficient to cool the reactor. There will not be enough time to install an alternate system. If we cannot cool the reactor, meltdown is imminent."

Dilan _hmph_s under his breath, prodding at the stone floor with the tip of his lance as if it were all their problems made manifest. "Beset from without and within."

"I dunno know about that one," Braig muses, one gun up on a shoulder now. "Seems to me, we didn't have too many problems with drought before the moon turned blood red and started pissing monsters."

"Do you have any evidence for their connection that we can put to any _feasible_ use?"

Braig waves dismissively at Even, smile a little wry. "No way. I'm just sayin', y'know? Two birds, one stone."

Master Ansem pushes the chair back and stands before his desk, the very motion itself a form of finality, and all of the men in the room stiffen to military attention from habit. "We will continue to pursue all possibilities in our research. Answers lie—"

"Most often where you least expect them, yeah yeah," Braig finishes out of turn, earning himself another pointed stomp on his toes from Aeleus. Before he has even fully recovered, however, Braig cuts in again, his grin falling and his eyes two narrow bands of light and shadow. "Now I've got a 'what about' of my own," he drawls. "Where's Kairi?"

Aeleus hums low in his throat (it's no secret he has long opposed the court's handling of the girl, descendent as he is from the old Royal Guard before the Galbadian insurrection), and says, "Wisest would be to bring the princess further under the protection of the castle. If she and her grandmother are moved here, they may also serve as company for Ienzo, freeing Even to research."

Braig stretches to sling a rather unwelcome arm over his closest peer's (Dilan's) shoulder, tapping one broad forearm with an arrowgun while he sights down the barrel of the second straight toward Aeleus. "Bang," he mutters, chuckling. "Now you're getting' it—two marks, one shot." He mimes pulling the trigger.

Outside, in the hallway, Ienzo shivers and stops eavesdropping. Before the apprentices and the master can conclude their discussion and disperse, Ienzo pulls the barely-cracked study door shut again and disappears in a flicker like the shadow of a passing bird.

He's getting so much better at not being caught.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Aeleus finds him later, long after Ienzo has written down every word (committed it to memory) and burned every note in the thin, red candle on the room's writing desk, flame gutted on plans and secrets. There's a delicate, patient tapping on the door which can only mean the tall physicist has brought him another book. Ienzo stands, crosses the room, and struggles with the doorknob—too high on the enormous door, and too heavy—but is finally able to let the man into the lavish room they've allotted him.

Aeleus has changed out of his stiff guard's uniform to the soft blue trousers and formless white top of the laboratory wear, as if he means to move straight from one role to the next, twelve hours on his feet before the castle gates to another twelve on his feet in the reactor's test chambers, watching the radioactive output with bloodshot eyes. He looks that tired at least, weary creases below his eyes and at the corners of his mouth making him look so much older than he is.

Ienzo tugs on Aeleus's wrist, his two hands not even enough to encompass the heavy bones of the man's sword arm, and maneuvers him, only because he is patiently willing, to the crisply-made bed, the only sitting surface in the room big enough to suit him. Ienzo has barely situated himself in the desk chair before he is reaching out again to take the enormous leather-bound book from Aeleus's hand, quick as a child offered sweets. The book is so heavy it nearly spills from his hands, and it's so oversized it takes all of his short arms just to hold it in his lap. The cover is unembossed, bound by enormous, tarnished silver buckles and molded leather straps. There is something that looks suspiciously like teeth marks on the bottom right corner. Just opening the cover is a chore requiring no small degree of acrobatics on the narrow chair, and even Ienzo has to squint to take in the tiny, exotic script on the title page.

_The Necronomicon_, it says, and nothing more.

Ienzo looks up at Aeleus, wants to ask, and the words are already forming on his tongue except—_found you—his father's eyes are two black holes into his head his mouth splitting nothing but teeth in the dark—come out, come out wherever you are—the lolling red tongue in the monster's mouth, reaching, reaching_—he chokes on the very shape of the words so badly Aeleus half stands, leaning to pat his back with a hand that might as well be a war hammer. Ienzo recovers but surrenders, struggling to put the question on to his face instead.

And that, perhaps, is the most wonderful thing about Aeleus—that words are so surprisingly unnecessary because the man has made a career of observation and takes the time to _look_.

"Tales of old gods and monsters," he answers Ienzo's unspoken query, gesturing to the book. "All of them true, if the sources are to be believed."

Ienzo leaves the questioning look on his face, shifted only slightly to show that he is asking something new. Aeleus elaborates without any need for pantomime or fuss: "You appeared interested when Even last mentioned the fiends—I thought you might appreciate what records we have of them." Here he looks aside, trailing off a little. "Perhaps you will find something the rest of us have missed." With his gaze diverted towards the great doors to the hall, he misses Ienzo's solemn nod, the knitting of Ienzo's brows and the bright glint of determination in his visible eye.

He came to this castle for a reason.

(_Kings don't collect sorcerers for no purpose, got it memorized?)_

A nice bed and books and warm meals aren't even part of it.

But he can't make any promises—any solid statements even—to Aeleus, to anyone—_why are you doing this to me? I don't know I'm sorry I don't know_—and he doesn't know enough yet about the city (or the state of collapse it has reached in his six months imprisoned in his own home) to know if there is any difference he can make at all. He needs to learn more about the situation, and only Aeleus will take him seriously enough—_believe me I am real please see_—to share information without his needing to eavesdrop.

So, for now, he sits back in the stiff writing chair and reads what he is brought, devouring the words as fast as he ever did for the tutors. Aeleus seems content to sit quietly, watching or withdrawn into his own demanding thoughts, and Ienzo finds it strange, as always, that the man's observation is not stifling or uncomfortable. If he had to put a word to it, he'd call it a companionable type of silence, broken only by the turning of pages, which seems to fill the room. Ienzo has nothing to compare it to, however. There were no children his age in his family's borough and his tutors always held private lessons. Ienzo has never had a friend, his age or otherwise, and it seems impossible (frightening) that he should gain one now, after he has become death and the destroyer of worlds.

For the first time in a long time, Ienzo stumbles in his reading. The words on the page seem utterly unpronounceable. Pursing his lips, he pushes the writing chair across the uneven stone floor, by stretching his toes, until he can hold the book out (arms trembling only a little under the weight) for Aeleus's inspection. Further to his credit, the man does not look remotely confused, only stares into the open book and reviews the line Ienzo is pouting at.

The man laughs a little, just once, and the tired frown on his face lightens to something almost near a smile. "I could not begin to tell you," he says, although by the next breath he is valiantly making an effort: "'_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn'_? It is no tongue I know of."

Ienzo is inclined to think it's nonsense, actually, and the thought must show on his face because Aeleus's frown lightens another shade and his eyes liven a little with mirth. He seems about to say something—perhaps to compliment Ienzo's natural skepticism—when the enormous booming of the chapel bells reverberates all throughout the castle, so loud and at such a frequency that it shakes Ienzo's lungs in his chest. There's no sense in even Aeleus's earth-solid voice trying to carry over it. By the time it is finished tolling—Ienzo is surprised by the lateness of the hour—Aeleus has sighed and is standing again. "I must check in on the reactor," he says, all the weariness returned and somehow more encompassing than it had been when he'd first stepped into the room. Ienzo sends him off with a nod and returns to his newest book—or makes a good show of it, at least.

The moment the door has closed behind Aeleus, Ienzo stands, leaves the _Necronomicon_ on the chair and pads to the door. Timing his turning of the knob exactly so that one of Aeleus's firm, echoing footsteps corresponds with the opening creak, Ienzo cracks the door the barest amount necessary to hear Aeleus travel farther down the hall. Once the physicist has turned a corner and the corridor has returned to abject silence, Ienzo also slips into the hall, tracing Aeleus's footsteps, although he remains well back of the man.

The walk to the control room for the reactor is so cumbersome. There is no path beneath the castle to the subterranean control and test rooms west of the city; Aeleus must leave through the front gate of the castle—hailing Dilan as he goes—and cross the central square to head over to the maintenance stairs; Ienzo, being miniscule enough to squeeze between any bars or under any hedge, has the benefit of the side alley exits, awash with pitch black shadows thick enough to muffle even the light thrown back by the tall drifts of snow heaped up around every trash can and back shop stoop. Ienzo breathes in tiny, staccato bursts so his breath will not mist in the frigid night air, and his steps are carefully selected so as to avoid any crunching under his standard court boots.

Above him, in the valley between two rooves, the sky is dyed over a deep red, the discolored moon out of view but the stars throwing back all its inhuman light until the night is spattered by a million distant, shivering flecks of blood—_what if he had stayed cut off in that house, what if he had stayed in that attic until the monsters of the Lunar Cry rolled over the stairs and he let them, near expecting smoke and mirrors, until their mouths opened on him, teeth under his skin, not illusions but reality_—Ienzo picks up the pace a little, darting one short glance back over his shadow into the unbroken dark, even the castle lights too high off to be seen.

His shoes on the metal walkways down to the reactor would be too loud, so he strips his boots off just before he reaches the walk, the cold of the stones between his socks like a blade drawn from the sheath, and he pads delicately across the walkways, careful to look through the gold grate beneath him to make certain Aeleus, passing below, will not see even his shadow. After what feels like a thousand flights of stairs down into the warm heart of the reactor, run off cooling water casting shifting reflections on the walls and railings above, Ienzo sidles toward the doorway to the control and measurements chamber. There is no suitable furniture or corners inside that he can hide behind, so he clambers over the nearest railing and sits on the top bar; with a little more stretching, he can look in the barred slit window.

Inside, Aeleus is hunched low over a digital interface, an unpleasant look of consternation forming lines in his brow that needn't be there. He does not like what he sees, apparently. Aeleus surveys the tables of information—a thousand times too small to be seen from Ienzo's precarious perch—without blinking for an impossible length of time, the data scrolling and scrolling up the dark glass.

He shifts to another machine afterward, and then another, and Ienzo is so used to having only the contents of his own head for company, the long, long wait does not bother him, although he has started idly kicking his feet just to keep blood flowing and a bead or two of sweat from the heat of the reactor has long rolled down his spine by the time he peers through the slit window again and discovers that Aeleus is slumped over the surface of the one tall metal table in the room, breathing slowly in a deep sleep.

The castle bells tolled ten before they left his room, and although there is no way to measure the time here in the hallway, Ienzo knows it has been long hours still, his own eyes starting to sting and every blink getting slower.

Silent as spiders, he skitters through the door into the control chamber, nursing it closed behind him with only the tiniest of clicks. Aeleus does not stir from his uncomfortable-looking lean over the table, heavy head buried in his arms.

Ienzo slips past successfully but encounters an issue immediately after when he reaches the computer bank and finds himself too short to see the screens over the projecting keyboards. Really? This is ridiculous. He'll have to pull one of the chairs from the table over, without making a sound or bumping Aeleus on his way. But how? There is no way he can lift the chair enough to keep it from scuttling over the tile, and no way it won't make sound when shoved, unless—yes, there. There's a long white lab coat on a hook inside the door.

Ienzo crosses the room on tiptoe again and pulls the coat down, practically a sheet falling all over his head, and he quietly bundles it up and sneaks toward the table. Lifting the farthest chair the barest amount he can, he slides the legs of the chair over the top of several layers of the lab coat. Dragging very, very carefully, he is able to inch the chair across to the computer bank without any undue noise.

He stares down at the scrolling data with as bleak a frown as Aeleus, although Ienzo's is more for the fact that he is looking at everything out of context, barely the slightest understanding of what might be considered standard or within acceptable deviation. All his prior learning regarding the Garden's nuclear power was filtered through a very nationalistic physics tutor all in favor of Ansem's push for nuclear energy; too much of a discussion of the reactor's operations had been lost under blind praise.

It's a dishearteningly long time before he sorts out which display is linked to which portion of the reactor—which set of data corresponds to each of the control rods, which to the orichalcum fuel rods, to the pressure of the water being pumped in and the steam being pumped out. It's even longer before the pieces begin to fall into place, click, click, click, and the whole pattern unfolds before him, sudden comprehension dawning where before the sprawling numbers and plot graphs had been as foreign as _Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn_ bare seconds before.

Then he sees what put the miserable look on Aeleus's face. The reports from the reactor aren't just fluctuating. They're impossible. Sudden spikes in power, sudden drops in output, radiation overflows, water levels changing by feet or even yards instead of millimeters, fissions just refusing to take place, laws of physics be damned… And all of it, as far as Ienzo can tell, without any detectable cause at all.

Monsters were one thing—written into every mythical or scientific history of their whole world. But this… was the world itself behaving in ways it shouldn't, the world itself in an outcry.

He knows no more about the source of Radiant Garden's dilemmas than he did before, but the problem has just become much worse.

Ienzo darts a quick look to Aeleus, who in all this time has barely shifted. Ienzo doesn't envy him in the slightest; between the guard hours and these anomalies, with no relief in either quarter, it's likely Aeleus hasn't seen his own bed in a week. There's a term beyond exhaustion in some language, probably. Shaking his head, Ienzo stretches to the nearest printer, pulling off one clean sheet and a fountain pen from the pencil cup above the display monitor. Deftly, he jots down the vital discrepancies so that he will not forget them.

Folding the paper over in thirds, Ienzo slides off the chair and tugs it back exactly into place. Only he can't return the lab coat to its hook unless he throws it. Well. Even though the room is warm enough, Ienzo feels a little altruistic when he reaches, on the very tips of his toes, to spread it over Aeleus as he sleeps.

The door to the control room eases shut behind him, and his eyes are slow to adjust to the dim of the corridor. When he can see again, he slips beneath a railing and peels off his socks and rolls up his pant legs so that he can step into the channel of water just beyond. The water is rushing and just shy of burning hot; as quietly but quickly as he can, Ienzo crosses the channel and touches his folded note to the one of the long plated pipes through which the reactor's super-heated steam is being pumped.

A ghosting ribbon of smoke spills from the note and then it ignites, thin paper reduced, in seconds, to a line of ashes drawn swiftly away by the current. Ienzo crawls back under the railing and back into his socks, shaking his feet dry in the process, and with one last look back toward the puzzling reactor and maybe—maybe—his first friend, he starts the long trek back up the maintenance stairs.

Then, "Uh-oh!" a voice says from somewhere above in the dark. "Someone's been a _bad _boy!" Something dark and heavy flashes an inch in front of Ienzo's eyes and slams into the metal walkway below with a terrific clanging. Squinting in the low light, Ienzo discovers the black shape is one of his own boots, which he left in a shadow at the top of the stairs.

A quarter of a second later it occurs to him to dodge, and, right on cue, the second boot falls like a brick. The noise echoes all up and down the corridor, and down below the control room door slams open.

"Who's there?" Aeleus's voice—no trace of sleep at all—cuts the corridor air like a knife. There's quiet for a second and then, not two feet in front of Ienzo, Braig drops from the stairwell above like a great black owl, his eyes the only thing eerily alight in the dim.

"Oops, my bad," the sharpshooter calls out down the stairs, chiefly unrepentant and smirking from ear to ear. "Thought I saw a rat."

Below them, Aeleus snorts. "If you have the time to shoot at rodents, you can come re-check the radiation reports."

"Aw, lameee," Braig gripes, but his expression doesn't fall in the slightest, still as clever, as predatory. "Fine, fine, I'm coming," he capitulates, and the control room door below closes with a ringing creak.

Only for the longest second Braig doesn't move except to cock his head to the side a little and survey Ienzo far too much like a war prize.

"You know what, kiddo?" he drawls. "I like you. You've got a lot guts packed in for a shrimp! Do me a favor, eh? Stay alive long enough, and maybe I'll let you join our secret club. Handshakes and headquarters and everything! It'll be fun."

His smile is like a sliver of white light being swallowed in the mouth of some unnameable beast.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The day after next, Ienzo is awoken at the ungodly hour of ten a.m. by the cold-hearted storm-front known as Even unceremoniously ripping Ienzo's warm duvet away and ordering him to be immediately conscious. On top of being impossible, it's just rude, and, as it's occasionally inclined to do, Ienzo's actual age—all of eight and a half—rears its rebellious head and makes him only curl up tighter and refuse to open his eyes.

Unfortunately, Even knows blizzard spells. (That's why he's always sent to do this, curse their brains.) So, a half second later, Ienzo is wide awake with an ice cube down the back of his night shirt and then Even is coercing him into some clothing that might be better suited on a miniaturized foreign dignitary, all silk brocade and golden embroidery, with a high, stiff collar and pants still a little too big. Once he has been trussed up like a show pony but without the slightest idea as to why (to his credit, it's still before noon and he was up all the night before reading about meteorological phenomena—deductive reasoning can wait), Even herds him out of the room and down long corridor after corridor. The geneticist mutters to himself the whole way that this is not his job, which Ienzo thinks is silly, considering he does it better than any of them.

By then Even has hurried him out a side entrance, blinking weakly in the sudden sun. When his eyes clear at last, Ienzo discovers they are in the jumping fountain garden, and that they are not alone.

An older woman in a pale purple dress is standing at the far side of the garden, chatting idly with Master Ansem, both of them sparing a watchful eye for the tiniest slip of a red-headed girl still unsteady on her feet, trying to catch the jumping jets of water as they pass before her face.

Even physically makes Ienzo stand up straighter as they cross the garden and yes, yes, he gets it now: this is the _princess_. That doesn't stop Even from pinching him when he bows too slowly, or stop the princess from taking one look at Even's displeased nose in the air and running for the hills, skittering behind her grandmother and peeking out from behind the old woman's skirts.

Master Ansem laughs, a rich, calming sound which comes as a surprise from a man in such a precarious position. Still not let up from bowing his head, Ienzo watches the master from under his eyelashes. The tense line of the master's shoulders has relaxed, and the lines around his eyes have lightened. It is obvious that he holds no small degree of fondness for the girl, no trifling amount of pride in her presence.

"No need to be frightened," he murmurs, chuckling, and the princess eases out from behind her grandmother, helped along by a few soft nudges from the older woman. "You have met Even, of course," he adds, though the comment is directed more to her grandmother than the princess herself. "Ienzo is my youngest apprentice."

Even has to pinch his shoulder again to get him to bow this time, because Ienzo is more than a little struck by his unexpected inclusion in their number. He hasn't received any orders or instructions or done anything meaningful at all. Undeserving and disingenuous aren't particularly pleasant feelings.

"This," Ansem continues, "is Her Royal Highness, Princess Kairi of the Sea of Eden's Gate and the Island Closest to Heaven." The girl seems to shrink under the weight of the enormous title, shyly scuffing one foot on the garden's stone path. From across the way, he would have called her unremarkable, hair no redder than Lea's and standard in every other aspect of form. Yet now, close enough to look down (only slightly) at her face, there's something wholly arresting about her—maybe the pale shade of her skin or the quality of the air around her, both of which seem to radiate not the presence of real light but the promise of it, the way gleaming reflects in a mirror—or maybe it is the smallness of her. He has never seen anyone smaller than himself, is used to feeling the most inconsequential, breakable, ghostly.

But more than these, it is her eyes: neither blue nor purple, a vivid indigo shade that bespeaks immense and ancient magic, and the way she stares out through them is like nothing so much as a porthole opening out onto a broad, smooth sea. She does not look at him so much as into him, and the overall effect puts nothing in mind except that this is what the heart itself would be like, given vision, given voice.

She is wearing white trimmed with the lilac and deep red of the royal house (for that matter, so is Master Ansem), but her clothing is demure, well-suited to the civilian life her grandmother has chosen for her. Before coming to the castle himself, Ienzo barely knew they had a princess, had never seen a portrait. For all that he was intended to be a regent, Ansem has become a well-loved king in his own right.

But for how much longer? How much longer before the threat of war and invasion fuel every dissident fire and his elected status and peace-loving principles are made fodder for every vile, throne-coveting back-sector aristocrat with a chip on his shoulder? Dilan is right to be wary, right to think they are pressed perilously on all fronts.

Even has inclined his head stiffly and is leaving (hypocrite, to make Ienzo observe every formality and skip out on the subservience himself!). This, in turn, leaves Ienzo utterly adrift. Is he to stay, to leave, or was he summoned for some particular purpose? For a moment a flush of indignation comes over him; has the master titled him an apprentice just to lend some credence to _Ienzo_ nannying after _Kairi_? He is young and small and helplessly quiet but Aeleus has revealed enough just of his reading ability to prove Ienzo is a thousand years out of infancy. He does not even know how to think like a child anymore. Could he honestly be meant to keep company with a girl barely out of toddling?

Unfortunately, it seems that is exactly what Master Ansem intends.

"Ienzo, take Kairi to see the undine's pool," the master declares, gesturing imperiously to a clear, still pond not far away. She could certainly go herself; she looks smart enough not to drown. But Ienzo is apparently an _apprentice_ now and not named Braig, and that means when an order is given by the master he's expected to obey. Clever way to head off any protests, old man. Ienzo nods finally, reaching out a largely unenthusiastic hand, and after a long moment of warily surveying him, Kairi puts her own tiny hand in his.

It's a little like touching a live wire. The contact sends a rush of cold, familiar electric tingling beneath every inch of his skin, exactly as he came to associate with the start of his magic, with each new, unpredictable, unwilling spell leaking out the barrier of his body. It's everything he can do not to tear his hand back from her and run. Around his leg, the Midnight Anklet seems to shiver—whether from her power or his is impossible to tell.

She looks at him funny—not like he's got a strange look on his own face, but like he is a strange creature of a breed she has never seen before, a type of magic she has never touched. She is _studying_, and he'd call it precocious but that'd be pots and kettles for real.

Instead of taking his hand back, he just turns around and starts to march, and he tries hard not to be too petulant, but she still stumbles a bit trying to keep up. Anyway, the pool isn't so bad. It had entranced him too for a while after he'd first seen it: it is a straight hole down and down into the bedrock upon which the Garden sits, its depths illuminated by a thousand prism crystals catching and refracting the light so lazy rainbows by the hundreds swim like fish, scattering the moment he turns his head. Nothing lives in the pool, although Master Ansem told him that before the castle had ever been built, a powerful, benevolent water spirit called Siren had lived there, and her presence lingered in the name even today. Kairi looks suitably enthralled, kneeling to peer closer at the water, tilting her head this way and that to watch the light shifting.

In this moment of distraction, Ienzo feels a sort of prickling down his spine, and turns his head a little to peer out through his bangs back to where they came. He and Kairi are being watched. No, _he_ is being watched, and not just by Master Ansem but by Kairi's grandmother too. It's not the sort of protective look he'd expect from family of the fragile princess, but a scrutinizing look as if she too is attempting to see through him down toward some unspoken truths. Somehow, oddly enough, the expression is warm and well-intentioned, and he has never had a grandmother but he suspects this might be the expression worn when grandchildren claim their skinned knees need no washing out. He can't tell what she's looking for or what she will find.

By now Kairi is looking at him strangely again too. In a garden containing the king, the princess, and a plethora of natural and magical phenomena, somehow he has become the center of attention. And it's nice to be noticed (_I am here this is not a dream see me_), but he's grown so used to eyes sliding past him that the weight of their stares is frightening (_found you_) and there's nowhere to hide because he let himself be led here and he has a mission and there's nowhere else a boy like him (_sorcerer is he really one of those kinds of people our son really_)—trapped—Kairi tugs on his hand until she finally catches his attention.

"'m sorry," she says, in a tiny, worried voice.

"For what?" Ienzo hears himself ask, distant as the bottom of the undine's pool.

Kairi touches her heart with her free hand, short fingers outspread. "You hurt."

She can tell. Somehow, no matter how far down the magic has pushed it, she can tell he is still in the hot dark attic certain he is going to die not knowing by father's hand or the monster's mouth, not knowing whether he really has already died and just plays a convincing living thing, everything around him changing, shifting, mutating, nothing, nothing, nothing to trust in—

"'s okay," Kairi says, and suddenly she is hugging him, earnest and sad and netting her fingers in the back of the expensive jacket so tightly she's liable to snag the embroidery. He cannot remember the last time he was hugged. He cautiously returns the gesture, most of all because she's princess and politeness is a thing.

It takes her so long to let go he's almost afraid she's fallen asleep standing, but when she pulls away, she's clear-eyed and smiling. "See?" she says. "Better."

And he does, unbelievably enough, feel a little lighter, so he sits down next to her and badly sketches out the story of the pool in its damp dirt shore with a stone. Yes, maybe he embellishes a little in a way the master'd lacked the imagination to, and maybe she falls for it hook, link, and sinker, so that by the time he's finished he also thinks maybe, maybe her company is not to so bad as he first expected.

By the time she has seen every bit of the garden and gotten his expensive new clothes soaked through ten times and he's carrying both sets of their shoes with his pockets full of her picked flowers, they make it back to Master Ansem and Kairi's grandmother. Ienzo expects the two of them to look pleased that their charges get along, but when they look at him both of the adults are somber, all frowns and furrowed brows. The look on the master's face is so unhappy Kairi tries to hide behind Ienzo of all people.

Has he done something wrong? The castle's inner gardens are all heated by radiating pipes from the reactor; she won't catch a chill.

Kairi's grandmother is moving, and when she stops in front of him, she leans wearily and reaches out wrinkled hands to cup his face (_his father's hands closing—a vice grip—he can't breathe—_). But all she says is "You poor dear," emphatically, quietly amazed. "You are such a strong child."

Master Ansem watches carefully, not speaking. Ienzo doesn't know where to look or what to do. So he _was_ being evaluated all along. There's a slow boiling of terror in the pit of his stomach—how much does she know, could she tell just from watching? How much is she going to say, here and now, so that he has to remember it (relive it back in the dark place dead but not a ghost—)

There's a reassuring softness to her face, but still he stares up at her desperately, trying to tell her without crying out that she has to _stop_—

"Only a child's heart could possess enough pure Light to survive such terrible wounds. Were you even a little older, you might have given in to Darkness…" The old woman shakes her head, eyes downcast and full of an old sadness that isn't for him but might as well be, now. "I thought at first you had done so well you'd overcome it, but I can see now that you haven't…" Her hands tighten a little on his face, not frightening so much as a strangely protective gesture, her skin dry and thin like old linen, like the bed in the attic made of his parents' cast-off clothes. But Ienzo darts a nervous look at the master, because this is the part he has not even hinted at, a little too close to home still—

"You touched a Serenity Crystal," Kairi's grandmother says, "didn't you?"

"A fortune-teller's?" Ansem asks, surprised.

"Or someone with moon sickness brought on by the Cry," she frets.

Serenity Crystals can suppress negative emotions, soften the sharp edges of trauma. Everyone knows this, Ansem most certainly of all. And it doesn't bother Ienzo that Ansem—that everyone—knows he suffered, turning up penniless in borrowed clothes at the gates of the castle took so much care of that—but somehow it bothers him that the master should know he took the coward's option, couldn't string two thoughts together long enough to stay sane without someone else's artifact—that he wasn't brave enough to—

"It's as if everything that happened to you happened long, long ago," Kairi's grandmother muses, but the expression on her face says she knows just how recently he suffered, felt so much fear and sadness he'd erased himself from half the world to him, and nothing can keep what happened from lingering in his mind, playing out behind his eyelids every night so that he constantly wakes, not in terror anymore, but with a feeling half-forgotten dread and guilt that he was too weak to just… just move on.

"That's why you won't speak?" she asks. He nods. Too many memories of voices, too many questions to answer, too many roads back down into the dark.

"Serenity Crystals are old and rare, and they lose power quickly," the master seems to think aloud, largely to himself. "Such magic would not have been freely given."

Kairi's grandmother nods, looks at Ienzo with renewed sympathy curling up the crow's feet of her eyes, and he'd be disgusted if every feeling she displayed did not seem so very genuine. "What more," she whispers, "did you have to lose?"

That, Ienzo will not tell, even when Master Ansem himself takes Kairi's grandmother's place and without hesitance reaches out so that Ienzo is caught in his arms, and his voice is so firm it sounds just like Ienzo's father when he says "No more. You are safe here," every word punctuated by promise. That is when Ienzo realizes it was not an evaluation, but concern, real human sympathy and worry for a thing like him that brought them all here. Ansem's head fits guardingly over his so that Ienzo can hear the feel the words humming down to his ear (head, heart), and so he can believe the master means them. That they mean something. That maybe the master's fondness was not all for Kairi.

He can hear his heart, or someone's.

Two hugs in one day. He feels spoiled.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Ienzo is encouraged to "help" around the labs after that, much to Even's initial dismay (and ultimate despair) when it becomes apparent that Ienzo is alarmingly capable and so terribly good at generating scenarios that Even is no longer the apprentices' sole researcher into the calamity, sorely deserving of praise for his valiant efforts. Even reacts rather primly to this halving of attention, misplacing one or two of Ienzo's files, leaving the beakers just a little too far back on the countertops for Ienzo to reach.

No matter. Ienzo is better at subterfuge by far, and if Even is going to spend the next half millennia smelling like he bathes in the bacteria cultures, well, he had it coming.

Today they are deep in the heart of the castle, cross-checking attack occurrences with tidal patterns to determine if the fluctuations in water level, which Even has established occur before the monsters materialize, are indicative of the number of fiends which will appear. Ienzo is necessarily frustrated, given that he could have compiled this data alone and in his sleep, for that matter, but Even will not let him operate the computer alone for reasons he refuses to share. To make matters worse, Even has purposefully stacked all the printer paper just two or three inches too high for Ienzo to reach it, despite standing on the computer chair. Like that will make Ienzo actually _ask_ for Even's help.

Ienzo leans forward, stretches, and yes, maybe he puts a foot on the desk, but it's not like he meant to step on the keyboard—only he does, just a little, and there's an incriminating, displeased beeping from the mainframe so loud he barely has time to scramble back down into his seat before Even is looking up from his agar to glare menacingly in Ienzo's direction. Of course, he is met with a practiced, pitch perfect innocent expression, and Ienzo even shrugs a little for effect.

Until he looks back to the screen, and then his shrug might as well be real. A new command-line shell has appeared over his research on the screen, and the white text splashed across the black background reads:

F:\SRIIlaser\ digitize\User_ runsrl

Do you want to run the Sister Ray II, Y/N?

Ienzo darts a glance across the room to guarantee Even has gone back to his petri dishes, and then he considers the options. He tries to click off the shell but the window flashes and refuses to be moved behind his book of spreadsheets. The close button doesn't remove the window and Ctrl+Alt+Del does not display the window as a running program.

He has no option but to answer the question.

Even would have answered no. Ienzo knows the second part of that saying about cats.

He types a Y. Nothing happens for a moment and then there's a distinct whirring of servos behind him, a machine humming swiftly to life. He doesn't have time to turn around—all he hears is Even's shocked "Ienzo!" and then everything goes very… strange.

For a long moment, he's not anywhere. He's in pieces, broken down into packets and electrical current and despite feeling fairly certain he doesn't have a body at the moment, something that is neither light nor sound thrums through him at a frantic pace, and he doesn't exactly have eyes to see but myriad kaleidoscopic shapes form and dissolve into the ether, and then, with a sinking rush in the pit of a stomach he doesn't have, Ienzo drops out of nothing at all back into his body on his knees in a place that is… most certainly not inside the castle.

The world has been reduced to polygons and angles, everywhere sheer drop-offs and everything rimmed by a neon glow from the blocky ground beneath his feet to the dark sky above, so distant it looks pixelated. Somewhere far ahead of him, a swift, dark shape moves through the sky, illuminated by a long glowing trail of blue light. Everywhere enormous blue pillars of energy run upward for what seems like forever, and far to his right, there's the dark skyline of a city. He can't figure out how to get there though, as he's perched on the edge of a towering cliff, with a straight drop of a thousand feet on either side, and the cliff doesn't seem to end no matter how far he squints in either direction. There must be a way down somewhere, but he could walk for days looking, and he still doesn't have the slightest clue how he ended up here, wherever here is. (Teleportation magic?) His best bet of being found is probably staying exactly where he is.

But exactly where he is is in a rather vulnerable spot. There're certainly life forms moving out there, and no way of guaranteeing they're friendly. Cover would be wise. Too bad there isn't any.

Well then, he simply needs to leave a trail behind that Master Ansem or the other apprentices can follow when they come to rescue him. (It takes him a long moment to realize that he actually does expect them to come find him, and then he shivers a little from the _surprisehappinesswonder_; there are people in this world again who care that he lives, not tainted by the misery of his uncontrollable magic (dormant, that last shock had made it curl down inside again like a sleeping beast) and his inability to be anything but a burden. So he will leave a trail for them, maybe of the fifty or so pens he's taken to hoarding in his lab coat pockets because Even keeps spiriting them off to slow his progress…

Only when he reaches for his pockets, he finds his jacket is gone. Just totally gone. In its place is some sleek material he can't immediately name, ridged and tattooed all through by lines, hexagon patterns, and thin rows of squares and dashes that looks like characters in a language he has never seen before, all of them glowing a bright, silvery blue not unlike the color of his hair. It's not all of one piece; there are boots over the skin-tight leggings of the suit that seem somehow riveted to the material above his knees, and gloves attached the same way so that a thin triangle of his arm at the elbow is bare. Narrow, glowing tubing bridges the light gaps over these joints, like exposed wires linking portions of an odd machine. Around his ankle, outside the thin boot, the Midnight Anklet blends in with the dark material, somehow impossibly unchanged, crystals glinting in the harsh light.

The collar of the suit is high but fit eerily perfect to his form, and the weight he's been feeling around his neck, when he removes it, turns out to be a set of headphones, the band across the middle made of something that looks like transparent, flexible blue light, the same energy running through his new clothes. On either side of the set, little pieces of this glowing material frame the ear wells, cut jagged and pointed like glass feathers. He turns the headphones this way and that in his hand, and then there's a strange whirring hum and suddenly words are appearing above the set in tiny, green typed text: _Persistent object, Valkyria Mono. Current function: ping_.

Ping. Like computer to computer communication. Digital wording appearing when an object is examined. Circuitry and polygonal architecture.

Well now. That's interesting.

Ienzo's taken his train of thought to the end of the line but hasn't decided whether he's willing to buy in and disembark, when, in an enormous roaring, a trio of machines goes blasting by overhead, low enough that Ienzo's whole body shakes with the pressure of their passing, and he ends up cramming the headphones on to muffle the noise, only they're strangely too big to fit over the top of his head, and slip down until the clear, lighted band is over his eyes. The moment the band falls into place, its blue glass surface lights up with information, telling him the retreating vehicles are "Light Jets" clocking in at 16 GB/s, all of them manned by basic programs.

So the piece of equipment isn't headphones. It's an administration utility. And possibly some sort of archaic Trabian warrior-maiden helm, but he's going to put that aside for the moment, because one of the Light Jets is turning around in a smooth, quick arc, and rapidly approaching again.

The plane dips so low it is on a collision course directly for him, liable to make him absolute paste on the surface of the cliff even if he lies out flat to try and avoid it. But before instinctive self-preservation can even get him down, the howling plane begins to just… dissolve, fold it on itself and disappear into little wireframe cubes that vanish into the ether, until just before it would have cut into the cliff right in front of him, the plane vanishes completely, leaving behind a single man loping toward him still from the plane's momentum, taping a baton on his shoulder.

"Hey there," the man calls, and something about the way his circuitry glows a bold royal blue is reassuring to Ienzo, although he can't tell why, especially because the easy way the man approaches could indicate a curious non-hostile or a confident predator. Apparent muscles and swiftness of foot seem to suggest the latter, although the smile on his face is quite disarming. "What's a little byte like you doing way out here?" The tone is generous, probably non-hostile.

Ienzo does not answer, of course (well, silence served him just fine in meeting everyone else; he isn't going to break his new tradition now), but he settles for a mildly hopeful, fairly lost look.

The man does not seem to get it, as if he can't read Ienzo's face at all. He stands rather patiently for an uncomfortably long time waiting for Ienzo to speak. When it finally seems to dawn on him that nothing at all is forthcoming, his own expression becomes a little concerned. "Too busy backing up your core data to spare me the time?" he jokes, although he is sidling a little closer and leaning like he wants to see Ienzo's upper back, which Ienzo thinks is rather odd until he darts a glance himself and notices the man is wearing—over the back of his own sleek, glow-lined suit—a disc that clings above his shoulders with no real means of doing so.

"Gotcha," the man says, nodding sagely. "Lost your identity disc, huh? Bet you're glitches from here to your tertiary parameters. Syntax-to-speech interface is always the first to go." Ienzo knows there's nothing more ridiculous than turning down a free cover story, so he nods, cautiously. The man cocks his helmeted head, frowns. "But you could just type, you know."

Type. On what, exactly? Then again, he's just seen an aircraft dissolve into thin air, so he's going to go with anything being possible. He lifts his hands out like he would sit them on the castle's computer keyboard and starts tapping at air. Of course, because all of his suspicions are really quite rapidly being confirmed, this works just fine, invisible keys of green-ish blue light flickering to life under his fingers. Just like with his scanner/headphones/whatever they are, the typed words appear as if printed on the air itself above his ethereal keyboard.

_I'm Ienzo_, he writes, and that's about all it's safe to say.

The man—although probably not, if Ienzo's conclusions are correct, and he really has found a way to convert his own body into _data_ and fall face-first into their _computer_—looks at him a little funny again, and types something himself in an utterly impenetrable programming language Ienzo has never seen before. It seems to be some sort of question, if the man's—the program's—expectant look is anything to go by.

When Ienzo stares at him blankly and types …, he whistles lowly through his teeth.

"Worse than I thought," he mutters, and then washes the concern away with a roguish smile. "Well, I'm Ram." He reaches out to rap his knuckles over Ienzo's hand, still out-stretched over the formless keyboard, and the touch sends a tiny, resonating power surge through Ienzo's arm. The Valkyria Mono pings and generates a whole new deluge of information about the "basic program" in front of him, such as that Ram's class is Gladiator, a warrior like he'd thought from the beginning, and that he was developed by someone named Roy Kleinberg on… a date that doesn't make any sense to Ienzo. The program has apparently been operational within the Radiant Garden OS for 150 cycles (whatever those are: he has nothing to base the measurement on), but the last time he was called upon by a "user" (_User Ansem_, unmistakable) was apparently more than a hundred cycles ago.

"I'm an actuarial program," Ram is busy offering, although Ienzo has clearly not asked. "Any chance you still remember your primary directive, byte?"

Ienzo pauses. Well, he could mean orders or purpose, neither of which Ienzo's really confident about. _I compile and analyze data_, he types, which is a fairly accurate summary of his days at the castle now.

Ram just laughs. "Well we all do _that_!"

Ienzo resists (barely), a derisive scoff. Sure programs can gather data and generate charts, but they can't make real human deductive jumps and match data from unrelated programs and make suppositions which initially appear illogical but ultimately reveal themselves to be—there's another long pause in Ienzo's thinking when he realizes, with a sense of reluctant hope, that he just used the word "real" to mean himself—and meant it.

Here, in a world inside a computer, invisible, impossible, dream-like and unsettling, he knows, at the very least, where he stands because he _can _read surprise, concern, amusement on another creature's face, because he can conceive of the world beyond, because even here—even here, look, he is not alone. Real, a real person, not a dream.

(Then it occurs to him, a twisting, quiet little thought in the back of his mind, that his magic might not even _work_ here, might roll right off the backs of programs and packets who are built to identify, seek out, and discard abnormalities in the system. What would an illusion be like within a virtual world, peopled by—apparently!—programs easily rebuilt from prior back-ups? This is the first time he has thought scientifically about it—about his magic—and though there's the now-familiar welling of panic and nausea at the thought of the magic alone, there's also, just beginning—perhaps because of the Serenity Crystal—a whisper of curiosity.)

Ram rubs at the back of his neck and shrugs. "Well, there's no sense collecting errors out here. I was on my way to the Game Grid anyway; they hand out new identity discs there. :D"

If Ienzo is to blend in here for as long as it takes the others to rescue him, he may need one of those identity discs, and far better to walk into town with a native guide than wander about himself. Still, there's that matter of a trail…

_Ram_, Ienzo types, _is there a way I can leave a message here?_

"Well sure, I guess," Ram shrugs. "Out here, disc clean-up clears personal stuff like that once a week, but the next clean-up's not for 18 millicycles."

Ienzo doesn't particularly want to ask _how _to leave a message, revealing that he knows next to nothing about the seemingly magical workings of this "virtual world" and giving himself away as human. So instead he takes a scientific guess and kneels to tap at the nearest large block of opaque black not-quite-stone beneath them. After a second, it flashes dimly and displays a list of options, like a large computer screen itself. One of these options, as he guessed, is "Message." Not wanting to call too much attention to himself, Ienzo uses a basic cipher to code the message; the master or the others should all be intelligent enough to figure it out—provided they know it is for them. He signs the message ("Going north to the 'Game Grid'") with his own name, not in code. When he is finished typing on the panel, the letters appear splashed large across the whole long screen. It puts off enough light to be noticeable from a distance—if one is looking for signs.

Finished, Ienzo turns to Ram and nods to show his willingness. Ram seems not to have considered any other option, however, as he is already preoccupied by keying in something on the sleek, black surface of his baton. When he looks up and catches sight of Ienzo's message, he grins. "Ready?" Ienzo nods again.

There's no preparing for what comes next. Ram crosses the short distance between them, snags Ienzo's wrist, and takes a flying leap over the edge of the cliff. Ienzo does not even have time to panic before there's a half-familiar digital noise, somewhat metallic in quality, and the jet plane Ram flew in on reforms around them, layer by layer, glow wire cage and then seemingly steel body immediately after, a stream-lined seat forming underneath him, complete with over the shoulder restraints. Using the baton, which has split into something like a steering wheel and integrated into the jet (is, maybe, all the jet ever was?), Ram easily levels out their flight and lifts them back into the open sky. They hurtle across the barren landscape at speeds Ienzo has not even dreamed of, a breath-taking blur of light moving on the horizon.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ĉίŧąđεł : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

**1)** **Stop.** If you have **questions**, there's a 90% chance the next chapter will answer them, so read that first. They were posted together for that very reason.

**2) Trivia**: If you can't get the literary reference in this chapter without a hint, you should definitely read more American horror literature. And might want to brush up on your pop culture. XD There's also an offhand reference to a well-known passage of the _Bhagavad Gita_ in here as well.

**3) References to other characters/fandoms**: I based all the history and lore of Radiant Garden on _Final Fantasy VIII_. If you see a name/location that isn't familiar to you (such as Esthar, Balamb, and the Lunar Cry), it's probably from FF8. A Final Fantasy wiki walk will bring you up to speed quick enough. Fans of other JRPGs might recognize Ienzo's item in the Tron world as a modern shout-out to Lenneth's helm from _Valkyrie Profile_. Ram is from the original _Tron_ film (and he's amazing), for any of you who missed that one. Twain is an OC based on TWAIN.


	12. Dissonance

**Note:** Surprise.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

» Τђε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

_Sarehptar_

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

_Ĉħą__ρτε__ŕ IV_

Ғāηŧąŝίą – Đεł – Şσġησ – ( Äηđąηŧε ) :

Đίŝŝσηąηĉε

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

The nearest city inside the virtual world is incredibly different from Radiant Garden. Certainly the Garden's sectors vary widely in their population densities and socioeconomic classes, but even the most populous sectors have absolutely nothing on the sheer number of people (programs) jammed into the sprawling city in the virtual world. All the buildings reach up to scrape at the sky and tower over the narrow streets, every one of them a castle by the Garden's standards. Programs going about their business crowd the sidewalks, and four-wheeled vehicles made of the same sleek false-metal and light as Ram's jet clog the streets.

Thankfully Ram has elected they walk, maybe because he can tell Ienzo feels a little like some of his molecules have still not caught up from the flight, all shaky and thin as a light breeze. Or maybe it's for the effect: the Game Grid turns out to be nothing so small as its name might imply but an enormous sweeping structure carved out of the digital landscape itself, parts of it curved like an enormous coliseum and other parts dotted by incongruous towers and rooms jutting out impossibly unsupported in space. Ienzo is used to feeling small, but the vastness of this facility is so closely on par with the castle that the fact it all exists within a single set of circuits and chips refuses to compute. He stares, maybe a little dumbly, as they scurry up a long flight of stairs and under carefully crafted archway after archway, every edge and curve glowing with soft, pale blue.

Ram appears to be well-known and well-liked. He's hailed by half a hundred programs as they go, some stopping to slap him on the back or ask when he will be "playing" again. He waves them off with a steady, pleasant grin and a winking eye, assuring them left and right that he's only waiting for a "decent challenger" to make it worth his while. From the snatches of conversation and cheers, Ienzo gathers that he happens to have encountered not just a gladiator but_ the_ gladiator, and he's not sure if that's good luck or just his luck to go attracting so much attention.

Inside the towering gates of the Grid's spectator entrance, Ram leads him across a gapping foyer and down a small, dim maintenance stairway. Down a long but wide corridor in the first basement level, Ram starts peaking in open doorways. Ienzo only gets short glimpses himself before Ram hurries him along, but the rooms seem to be teeming with programs in clean white uniforms (achingly bright in comparison to his own jet black and the overall black of the world) busily speaking to heavily armored programs in black or fiddling with (eerily enough) computers of their own, swiping hands above glassy-looking screens and reporting outputs and energy levels.

Finally, Ram finds a room which is relatively calm, no other warrior-looking programs inside, and he waves to the nearest program in white, a lithe, pretty woman whose hair is as white as her uniform. "Heya Twain, busy right now?" Ienzo's data display handily tells him she is a visual interface expert, older than Ram, but a much less complicated file, written in C and not directly connected to a user.

"I'm not busy yet." She smiles, and her ice-blue eyes are little off—missing pupils, Ienzo realizes—but it seems she has no problem seeing them, because she then looks down at Ienzo himself curiously, cocking her head to the side like an interested dog.

"Great," Ram says. "I picked up this glitched basic out on the mesa. With the number of bugs roaming that area, he wouldn't have lasted much longer on his own—no identity disc."

Twain's face darkens a little, although that's entirely figurative, as she is so pale it is virtually impossible to tell where her clothing ends and her skin or hair begins. "Dumont reported another 503 bugs just in his range in the last five millicycles. The growth has officially been labeled exponential. They're talking about shutting down the Grid until something can be done."

"Geez!" Ram throws up his arms in frustration. "Out another job?"

"How do you think we feel?" And some of the other white programs that have been surreptitiously eavesdropping give up their attempts at looking busy to nod and make complaining noises of their own.

One of the farthest programs away, a broad-shouldered, grizzle-faced man, looks like a tempest in a teacup. "At this rate, it won't be long before the whole damn system's overrun and we all go down in fatal errors." Someone nearby ribs him to get him to quiet down, but far too many downcast faces across the room seem to echo his sentiments.

Ienzo is all set to be confused but then it _clicks_: the error-ridden data from the reactor, the mainframe's failure to find any patterns, missing records, inaccessible files, every time he's had to restart the system thinking he himself did something wrong—none of it was operator error; the system itself is failing.

The system itself is failing, and outside, in the real world, the faceless, formless enemy creeps nearer, affecting the Garden in untraceable, malignant ways, a host of aberrations marching, unstoppable, toward the heart—inside the computers, the decay advances just the same, another name for the same crawling darkness.

If there were some way to sync—if only there were some way to utilize the power present here—Ienzo's mind is already racing a mile a minute (GB/s?), and he's so lost in his thoughts it actually takes him a long moment to realize Ram has nudged him over to a small flock of the white programs, who are in turn hustling him toward a low platform in the middle of the room. When he steps on the platform, there's a clinical beeping and a flare of white light all around him that must mean he is being scanned, although what they're looking for, he can't tell. (Or what they'll find…)

There's a collective stilling when the results of the scan are displayed across the nearest screen. The white programs all cluster around the screen with growing looks of concern and intrigue in equal parts splashed across their faces. It's somewhat comforting for Ienzo to realize that Ram doesn't seem to quite understand the language the results are displayed in either, leaving him just as out of the loop, but then, in a hushed voice, Twain says:

"There's no developer or properties."

"Could corruption have overwritten the user?" another of the programs suggests.

Twain shakes her head. "There's no corruption. He's functioning at 100%. Except…" she points to a dark mark on one of the three dimensional graphs generated by the scan. "Except for this. There's some sort of disruptive energy causing a block here. I can't tell what's behind the firewall. But it's taking up a huge amount of ROM."

The magical effects of the Serenity Crystal. They must not conform to digital standards; even here, it seems, magic plays by its own rules. (There's another little niggling from the corner of his mind that wonders how the system might adapt to power like his own, how illusions might take shape out in the empty, dim-lit wastes…)

"Anyway, everything else's still operational, so I can't figure out where the developer info's gotten off too—even the file size is missing."

Ram peers, narrow-eyed, at the displays. "Any chance it's encoded?"

"We'd still see the encoded data," another female white program in the back says. "This is just a bunch of blanks."

One of the other programs balks. "Could he be an ISO?" Everyone else turns in unison to stare at Ienzo, some mouths open and someone in the back actually looking like he'd rather leave now before things get awkward. The big male program (the Valkyria Mono doesn't display his personal name, but lists his primary function as memory testing) crosses the floor in three swift strides and nabs Ienzo's arm—not roughly, but not lightly enough for Ienzo to get away either—and simply wipes the upper arm of Ienzo's uniform away with some complicated set of finger movements which may be key input.

"No mark," he announces. The current of shock fizzles out, and the program restores Ienzo's sleeve, letting him go with at least something like an apologetic look.

Ram, however, looks more perplexed than ever. He gives Ienzo a particularly intrigued side eye. "So you're not an ISO, but you don't have any developer info. And your vocal processing's fine, but you won't talk. And somebody installed one hell of a firewall into you, but you're still a free program..." (This last seems to mean he's still one of "them," which may indicate there is something else to be than "free"…) "There's nothing more you can crack here?" he asks, turning back to Twain.

She shakes her head, white blond bangs drifting along her forehead. "Other than giving him an identity disc, not much. This facility isn't outfitted for bypassing firewalls." Not that Ienzo would have let them get that far anyway—and not likely that their methods for overriding security would even have affected the magic of his world anyway, but still.

"You know anyone that can?" Ram asks.

The room goes eerily silent, all of the white programs frozen in place, sharing slow, unhappy glances. Twain frowns, looks down. "Well, Tron could…" she whispers finally.

Ram sucks in a breath between his teeth and pinches the bridge of his nose. But when he looks up, there's nothing short of a fire in his eyes. "We will get him running again, don't doubt it."

The memory tester snorts. "Much longer and there won't _be_ a system for him to debug anymore."

Tron. Ienzo feels like the name is vaguely familiar, something he heard in passing from the master or one of the apprentices maybe? A file he stumbled across while working? He can't remember, and it's coming back to bite him now. Tron can apparently debug—that is just the type of program Ienzo would need to contact to find out if it might be possible to do the opposite of what he had just done, _un_digitalize something and let it affect the real world—

By the time he looks up out of that train of thought, the white programs are all in a flurry again, tapping rapidly over their respective screens and announcing outputs in a manner that seems very ritualized. Twain has a sleek black ring in her hands, edged, as is everything else, in a soft glow of blue.

She moves to stand behind him, leaning down to speak in a voice equally routine: "Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disc. If you lose your disc, or fail to follow your user's commands to the best of your ability, you may be subject to rectification or deresolution."

She mounts the disc easily over the dock he had not even realized sat on the back of his uniform, the ring so big on him it takes his whole upper back. There's a _hum_ as it connects, and then for a moment he feels as if he is outside himself, seeing with a second set of eyes—then every settles, and he feels as normal as ever, albeit a little rejuvenated. Twain nudges him so that he steps off the pillar toward Ram, and then Ram actually reaches out and ruffles his hair so badly some pieces of his bangs get under the VM's eye screen, tickling his eye and nose. Ienzo has to blow his bangs out from behind the screen with a heavy breath, or risk sneezing from the tickle. Hyne only knows if they even sneeze here.

Ram snickers and pats him on the back of the neck, above his new disc. "What am I supposed to do with a mysterious little byte now?" He stares at Ienzo contemplatively for a few seconds, tilting his helmeted head this way and that.

Twain makes a tiny noise, half hidden behind a hand. Darting her eyes about to check if the others are still listening in, she barely whispers, "You should take him to Tron."

Ram blinks once, slow, and then a strangely guarded look crosses his face as well.

"Well?" she gripes, still so far under her breath Ienzo has to strain to hear despite standing right in front of her. "I know you know where Tron's source code is being kept. We don't know what this one's—" she means Ienzo, apparently, "—function is. He's just like Tron, with half his files missing. It's possible that he may have hidden utilities that could make a difference..."

Ram hesitates, eyes Ienzo again, then nods. "Well," he grins at Twain in a silly, flirtatious way, "I trust your judgment." And the seriousness of the message is easily belied by the light drawl he uses to say it, such that none of the other programs in the room even look up from their own data banks when Twain huffs and rolls her eyes.

"Get going," she groans, shoving Ram with an errant hand. Then, quieter, she says, "Come back and tell me if there's any change, okay?" Quieter still, staring directly at Ram and not blinking, she breathes, "I still believe Flynn Lives, you know."

"Forever '89." Ram snorts and shakes his head, and it's all code for something, Ienzo is sure, but he can't devote time to thinking about it now when there's so much else he's already trying to take in. Ram claps a hand around Ienzo's shoulder anyway, distracting him. "Let's get a move on, byte." A little louder, he adds, "You're going to overload when you see the Grid itself!" He offers a jaunty salute to Twain on their way out.

Only once they're back upstairs in the foyer, Ram lightly dismisses the Grid employees trying to get him to join in the games, and he steers Ienzo firmly back out through the towering gates and down along the stairs. When they reach the street level, Ram pulls out the baton where he had stored it, collapsed, on a mount below his identity disc. Ienzo stiffens. Not the jet again; ugh, please not the jet.

"Ready?" Ram asks. Ienzo is very tempted to frantically shake his head. Of course, Ram never gives him the chance. He catches Ienzo under his arms and _tosses_ him, taking a running leap immediately afterward himself, and just when Ienzo expects to hit the pavement in a messy, unpleasant way, the smooth, bright lines of another new vehicle warp into place beneath them. Ram leans forward over the top of him, caging him safely in place, as there are no belts or guards this time. The baton has split to either side of an enormous, roaring front wheel, and Ram uses its two halves like handle bars, weaving the machine in and out of traffic on the city roads. The VM pings and informs him he is on a "Light Cycle," travelling slightly above the recommended street transfer rate of 2 GB/s.

The wind (maybe that's just electrical current along the circuits?) rushes past his ears so loudly he can't hear anything else, but his identity disc presses against Ram's chest and like a conductor carries the sound of the program's voice through so Ienzo can hear it. Only Ram isn't speaking—he's making some kind of strange, synthetic noises, clearly not human, in rhythmic, repetitive patterns, and it takes Ienzo a long time to realize the program is _humming_, imitating the electronic sounds that must pass as music here in the virtual world. He is even drumming on the handle bars, alive and pleased and carefree.

The feel of his hair whipping over his face should irritate Ienzo, but by the time he gives up and lets it fly where it will, they're out of the city and streaking across the glass-like landscape at speeds so fast he can't breathe, which he finds is somehow, frighteningly enough, not detrimental to his health here. The VM's glass screen is probably the only thing keeping his eyes from running, if they can do that in this place. The blurring of the dimly-lit landscape around them and the towering beams of light all across the horizon eventually becomes too much for his eyes to handle, and he closes them—he swears—for only a moment.

But feels as if a long stretch of time has passed when his eyes fly open again, jerked from dozing by several simultaneous pings on the VM. Something is approaching from behind them, and fast. They show up on his data screen as flickering red dots. _ANOMALY_ the screen reads, flashing and flashing. He wriggles until he can tap at one of Ram's arms, and twists the barest amount so he can to point behind them.

Ram whips his head around and then curses. He revs the Light Cycle's engine, and then there's a low click and a stream of light pours out behind the cycle in a long ribbon that traces their path. Ienzo can't see how lighting themselves up like the reactor is going to help them hide in any way, and then Ienzo realizes Ram is weaving back and forth in smooth, practiced waves, spreading the ribbon over the widest area and keeping it purposefully between them and their pursuers—which are gaining.

"Bugs," Ram groans. "I thought I was going to get away without a run-in for once. That'll teach me to count my packets before they're received…"

The VM's data screen keeps a running tally on the distance between themselves and the bugs. Even going full throttle, the number continues to shrink. Ram takes a hard left without warning, and somewhere behind them, there's a violent explosion. One of the red dots on the screen flickers out. Ienzo leans as far as he can to look back. From the very corner of his eye, he can see where the distant end of the light ribbon impacted a bug. Well, that's one down.

But when he looks back around to the front of the cycle, there's a small, somehow quaint building rushing up toward them at insane speeds, and there is no way they are going to be able to avoid it—what is Ram _thinking_—Ienzo can _see_ in the windows already—

Ram rips both pieces of the baton away from the wheel and rolls forward as the cycle simply derezzes underneath them, tucking Ienzo up close against him, and there's a terrible crash where they hit the ground but the inertia sends them shrieking across the ground in a storm of sparks, and Ram crashes into the front door of the building backward and plows straight through the room, knocking some solid things aside, to come to a sudden stop against the wall of—Ienzo tries to straighten his swimming vision by squinting—the wall of a café counter? There's a display case (now shattered) beside them, stocked full of silvery glowing bottles and what looks like neon-colored rock candy.

A woman's face—at least he thinks so? Everything farther than a foot away is still spinning—peers over the edge of the counter. "Ram!" a feminine voice shouts.

"Uhhh, about this…" Ram wearily stirs beneath Ienzo, his voice still a little shaky. "Sorry Yori, but we're about to have some company."

His head has cleared enough that Ienzo can see one pale eyebrow rise. The concern falls off the female program's face like a stone dropped into deep water. "Thank the users I just ran a back-up," she mutters. "For some reason, I had a feeling you'd be stopping by today."

Ram gently shifts Ienzo over—doesn't try to pick him up, which Ienzo is grateful for; he couldn't stand at the moment even if he wanted to—and the program struggles to his own feet. He doesn't look well. His circuits flicker briefly once or twice between steadying, and some of the glowing lines don't come back on at all. Bracing himself, he pulls his identity disc from his back and faces the door.

Sparing a split second glance over his shoulder, he shouts, "Lockdown Tron's data!" Yori nods and goes racing through a doorway into the back of the building. Ienzo has no idea what to do and no time to think of anything useful before the front of the building is literally torn off by the gaping jaws of nine enormous insect-like monsters.

He has creatures like this in his nightmares, in his illusions, clicking mandibles, tiny little legs working and working near the mouth, impossibly eager to draw in living flesh, the mouth just a hair-rimmed black pit, leaking, eyes split and roving in the boneless skull, spines emerging everywhere the armored plates do not reveal discolored muscle rolling and working the wire thin legs, tipped each with a single long black barb, more than broad enough to impale a man—and they're supposed to be voiceless, only the shivering and jerking of their mouth parts and the chittering of their legs makes for an encroaching wall of noise, the sound of so many things chewing, clawing.

The identify disc in Ram's hand powers up in a high-pitched rush, distorting the air around it as if by heat waves. The nearest bug leaps forward, and Ram rips the disc back and hurls it with startling, vicious accuracy. He is not titled a gladiator for no reason then. The disc rips through the armored back of the bug and keeps going glancing off another and off the wall before hurtling back toward Ram, who catches it behind his back without even looking. The nearest bug reels, writhing, a long red gash cut through its green and black exterior.

But it doesn't die. And although it is slow to stagger back to its feet, the delay doesn't matter when there's a seemingly impossible number of bladed legs and reaching fangs, pushing forward and ripping through the very walls of the café when they cannot crush themselves closer in—Ram hurls the identity disc again and again but the crash has clearly slowed him down and he's so badly outnumbered. Even as he deals out blow after blow, pushing them back to give himself space to flip over, under, and around their lashes and lunges, it's not enough. One bug goes down finally but the others simply step through its derezzing body and continue, completely uncaring, focused entirely on simply annihilating the whole program before them…

There are too many. Even if Ram is _the_ gladiator, destroying all of these at once while unable to flee because this place is guarding whoever "Tron" is… Ram has his back against the wall.

Only he doesn't, and he maybe really should because Ienzo notices the smallest of the bugs detach from the mass and lay its belly down on the floor, its too-long jointed legs not jointed enough times to reach in this pose, and it drags its body along the floor in grotesque hulking lurches, safe—down so low—from the disc ricocheting off walls and its partners' bodies. Ram doesn't see it, can't see all of them at once even if he is a program, because he's still in the shape of a human now and that means his eyes face forward to the bulk of his enemies, and the little bug is slithering closer, nearly within strike range of his unprotected back—

"_RAM!_" The word tears free of Ienzo's throat without his ever willing it, raw and hoarse from disuse and as loud as he can manage after so much silence; there's a liberating, adrenalin-fueled rush that accompanies the word, the sound of his own voice again in the enclosed, dark space (_I am here, father, I am here_) and he wants to scream again but both the deed and the damage are done: Ram spins, sees the hunched up bug, and brings the disc down on its head with terrifying force; the bug's whole head caves in and leaks green light and crystalline wired chunks before it derezzes in an shower of pixels. But the movement leaves Ram's back open on the other side, and Ienzo sees this a second too late, realizes what he has done—

Only the bugs don't swarm Ram immediately. In fact, faster than Ienzo can blink, they scuttle around Ram, all of their multiplicitous, camera-like eyes swiveled to train on Ienzo, where he sits weak-kneed and utterly unprotected, weaponless and easy prey, in the open.

_Found you_.

There's not enough space or time for Ram to get between without fighting them all off at once and he can't, couldn't do it before, can't do it now while frantically trying to push forward, to slip past in time, hacking away at anything in reach with the identity disc. It won't be enough. Ienzo throws himself to his feet by sticking his hand into the nearest crevasse—which happens to be the jagged edge of the display case glass—but he can't even feel the slit that opens across his palm, and he forces himself away and over, desperately trying to put anything between himself and the monsters to just buy a little time—the nearest elongated leg strikes the identity disc guarding his back, doesn't cause pain but throws him off his feet and sends him rolling across the glass and debris strewn café floor. It's almost enough to let Ram slide by, but they close the gap almost instantaneously, pressing down on Ienzo in a whirling, scuttling hoard.

There's a dim blue light beside his eyes, close enough that it appears shapeless and out of focus, light splintering like a firework. He reaches out in a motion that feels as if it takes a thousand years, and his bloody hand closes on the light to discover it is the cool steel tube of Ram's baton. Ienzo doesn't think after that, can't think anything except he isn't a program and doesn't have a back-up and he is so sick of feeling like he's going to die—

_I'm not afraid of the dark_ no more you're safe now _you promised_

_Well I lied._

Around his ankle, the Midnight Anklet _burns_, shivers and erupts in shocks that ring under his skin like a pulse, like the beating of his heart itself made into a million volts and rolling just beneath his skin—everything goes very cold and bright—and in his bloody hand, the baton unfurls into a thick black sheet and folds like the cover of a book, falls open in his grip to reveal a thousand glittering pages of wireframe ultraviolet light, words and diagrams and languages he has never seen, every word decoded, set out in even, perfect columns, all the world's secret heart laid bare in text before him.

It's a lexicon.

The VM pings. _Persistent object:_ _Shade Archive_, it says. _Current function: interpreter_. The edges of the book are taking on a strong, purple light.

The bugs have shuffled to the side, chattering, and Ienzo cannot figure out why until one dares to reach for him again and the anklet tingles and his fingers clench on the sides of the book without meaning to; a dark barrier flares in the narrow space between them, devouring the limb the bug has outstretched. Behind them, their pause and confusion is giving Ram time to cut his way through, but their stupor won't last long with blows raining on them from both sides. Ienzo stands, nearly overturned by the heavy weight of the book, and turns the VM's sensors on the bugs. At this range, the read-out is incredibly detailed, rattling off properties and code as fast as Ienzo can read it, lines rolling up in time to the flicking of his eyes.

The VM screen shudders to a halt suddenly and flashes red with a violent screech. There's an error in the code which flashes bright on the light display. The book in his hands responds without prompting or even real will, drifting free of his hands to float before him, open, pages flipping as if turned by a wild, invisible hand. They stop at the right number, and the information shivers and glows on the page, leaping off it to drift in the air above the book, clear as any other message he has typed here in the system.

Ienzo lifts his hands, palm down, and begins to type across the air.

Ram pulls back for another desperate swing, pouring every last bit of energy into the blow. Only nothing connects—the bug a half inch from his face derezzes before he reaches it. The other bugs burst into showers of sparks and fractals one after the other, and the Shade Archive closes and falls back into Ienzo's hands.

There's one bug left in the ravaged room—the one Ram first scored deeply with the identity disc. Ram moves to swing again, his arms shivering with the effort, but Ienzo is closer.

Ienzo faces the insect, tests a theory (_that is what he is best at, Even, watch and learn_)—the Valkyria Mono pings on the target—and then pings again, again, and again, echo request after request, triggered by Ienzo's blinking or by the racing electric signals of his brain. The bug shudders, tries to step backward only it was never meant for that, and it writhes down onto the floor, trying to lash out vainly at targets too far.

"Sorry," Ienzo says, hoarse, unshaking, "but we don't _serve_ your kind here." For good measure, he steps over and kicks it while it's down.

The VM pings one last time and flickers. A voice Ienzo does not think belongs to the bug but to the bug's actual program, disembodied, announces in a panicked voice: "All resources allocated. Warning, the process cannot be completed at this time. Not enough memory. FATAL ERROR."

The last bug derezzes in a particularly satisfying explosion of light guts and electric bolts.

"What did you do?" Ram breathes, all the fight going out of him so fast he falls straight down to sit on the floor.

Ienzo clutches the Shade Archive to his chest, only now beginning to feel the vicious throbbing from his cut hand. He's a little wary again, surveying Ram, still as tall as Ienzo is even when Ram's just sitting down. How much can Ienzo tell without disturbing the fragile balance of nesting worlds and digital existences?

He'd rather type if he's going to have to talk so very much—still more wary of the ways his own voice can betray him than of world order and universe collapse actually—but he's not going to put the lexicon down on to the debris-strewn floor anytime soon, and he needs both hands to hold it… Ram is getting to his feet and rallying, looking more curious by the second.

"I…" Ienzo tries to find the least damaging words. "I figured out earlier that this—" he shakes his head a little to indicate the headphones and eye screen, "—is a virtual machine. VM. I didn't know until now just how much of Radiant Garden's OS was on it, but it seems like all the system software is there. I just didn't know how to use it all at first, not without this book to interpret the programming language as something I could read…"

Ram is frozen, mouth falling open in shock. "D: All of the system software—"

"Including," Ienzo even manages a small smile, "the debugger."

Ram is walking a little closer, one hand bracingly extended like he can't quite believe what he's hearing and needs to feel it under his hand to believe it. "No one has that much access except—"

"A system administrator." Ienzo shifts the Shade Archive so that he can stretch out his bloody hand for Ram to inspect. Instead of simply looking, Ram reaches out and takes Ienzo's hand in his own much larger hands, which are, for some reason, trembling. He reaches two fingers out and collects a little of Ienzo's blood on them, rubbing already coagulated half-liquid between his thumb and index finger in abject confusion and awe. "I'm sorry I lied to you," Ienzo adds, maybe a little late.

But Ram just reaches out, grabs him, and _spins_ him in a full circle, whooping in nothing short of wild, ecstatic delight. "You're a _User_!" he crows, with more human likeness than Ienzo has seen from him all this time. The program's voice falls a decibel but his eyes stay literally lit up with just as much inexplicable joy. "You finally came…" His grin puts the moon to shame. "You can save the whole OS!"

Wait. What?

Ram never gives him the chance to ask. Literally hefted over the program's shoulder like a bag of bread, Ienzo can barely keep track of the lexicon, let alone figure out how to get down without causing some seriously bodily harm, possibly _with_ the lexicon, because he doubts he'd have any luck at all trying to throw an identity disc. Let alone catching it on the way back…

Ram is apparently hurrying, although his pace is still achingly slow from the energy drain, and even more parts of his uniform refuse to light or hold a steady charge. He will need a boost of energy before long, or he'll risk fatal errors himself. They head through the doorway Yori disappeared in, and down a deceptively long hallway (longer than the small café should have fit anyway), and finally Ram stumbles his way down a seemingly endless flight of stairs, only gravity or whatever it is that works on electrons racing over circuits keeping his downward motion in play.

At the end of the stairs, Ram stops, although given Ienzo is looking backward, he can't tell if they've stopped for a very bad reason or just because they've reached their destination.

Then a deep, synthetic voice demands "PASSWORD?" and it turns out to be the latter.

Ienzo can hear the grin in Ram voices when he says, "Knock on the sky." There's the whirling of servos and many small pieces clicking into place, and then, from the other side of what must have been a door, Yori's voice, smiling itself, answers: "And listen. Which _you_ have never been particularly good at."

"I'm all about risks and actions," Ram laughs, and then he swings Ienzo down in one clean arc, not unlike he swings his identity disc around, for that matter. "My assessment was right on the ROM this time." He claps both his hands over Ienzo's shoulders and presents him to Yori very much like a strange and exotic treasure. Looking back over his shoulder, Ienzo even spots an odd gleam of religious fervor on Ram's face when he announces, "This is the User Ienzo. He's a system administrator."

Ienzo doesn't have the heart to tell them he nicked the administrator key from Ansem's office because Even was so finicky about letting him override useless old data files and rearrange root folders into some sort of organization that made sense to other human beings.

Yori, meanwhile, has made some startlingly feminine gasp and covered her mouth. She kneels down immediately to look more closely at Ienzo, staring wide-eyed and curious and just as overjoyed as Ram. Although she still looks at him—eerily enough, not blinking—when she speaks again, she addresses the other program: "With that high a level of clearance…"

"Bingo," Ram confirms. Then, more solemnly, "Yori, access Tron's data."

The look on her face shifts from genuine excitement to a pinched nervousness, and she bits her bottom lip, looking, in that moment, nothing short of effortlessly human, as real as his mother, or Kairi. She nods finally. "All right."

Facing the right way around now, Ienzo can see that the room they have entered is nearly identical to the room in the Game Grid where he was given his own identity disc. A low white platform in the middle of the room is bathed in light from overhead lamps, and a bank of touchscreen computers lines the circular room. Yori crosses the room—and now that he looks, where is _her _identity disc?—and immediately, as if in answer to her very presence or the energy she exudes, the computer screens blink to life, an impossibly rapid scrawl of information. There's an answering shiver from the Shade Archive as it attempts to interpret the data for him, but he keeps it tucked close before him, no need to be involved when Yori so clearly knows her work.

If the white programs in the Game Grid were a flock, hovering and darting like dragonflies, Yori is nothing short of a bird in flight, every swipe, tap, and flick of her wrist so practiced and smooth, he does not see how she doesn't just disappear into the screen itself, a rushing blend of information channeled perfectly from source to target.

The white light at the center of the room begins to brighten to an almost intolerable degree. Ienzo leans his head away so that he looks through the gaps in his incredibly messy bangs, and in the pure, bright heart of the light screen, a blue and black ring begins to take form. A half second later, Ienzo realizes it is an identity disc.

The identity disc solidifies, its untarnished blue rings glowing brilliantly on their own, and it remains suspended alone for a long moment before another shape begins to appear before it, first only the impression of a form and then the digital wire cage outline of a tall, broad man, every inch a hero, even without details.

Those details fill in quickly, pixel by pixel, rolling in over the frame in a wave, and by the time they finish, the lights have dimmed to a tolerable level. Ienzo expects to see a figure matching the wire frame before him when he looks up at last, but the shape standing on the platform is somehow… grotesquely distorted, a Frankenstein-like amalgam of parts from two different people, the face right but a hodge podge of limbs lined with contrasting blue and red glows, the blue comforting in perfectly equal parts to the ominous, harsh glare of the red. The angles of the two sets do not seem to compute, with smooth, human looking lines where the blue circuitry flows and sharp, black metallic edges everywhere the mangle of body is red.

"This is Tron," Ram says, and the hurt in his voice says more than the whole lexicon could about what role this other program played in his life—in Yori's too, if the desperate way she stares up into the face of the thing on the platform says as much as Ienzo thinks it does. This is not merely a man to them but a savior, a champion, a sage. Yori actually looks as if she might cry, although Ienzo doesn't know if that's possible for programs, and she rallies enough to give some explanation.

"This system," she says, waving a hand around the room but meaning beyond, "is a copy of a system originally created by a User named Kevin Flynn." _Flynn Lives_. "That original system, the Tron System, was one of User Flynn's crowning achievements—a digital frontier capable of connecting to and aiding the world of the Users." She nods to him, managing a small smile. "Copies of that system were distributed to a vast number of people. However… in this copy, or maybe in every copy, something… went wrong."

Ram scoffs quietly to himself at the understatement. "Tron is supposed to be the heart of this system. He's the system's primary firewall and debugging utility. He was supposed to be this world's primary line of defense, and its quickest way of getting into contact with your world."

"But in the process of copying," Yori says, "some of the data must have become corrupted, and half of Tron's files have been lost. He's vital to the continued existence of the system, so the restore programs attempted to find the files; their clearance wasn't high enough to get anything useful back. Anyone who tried was derezzed for violating security protocol."

Ienzo sees the pieces coming together, of course, smooth as the formation of a Light Cycle.

Ram picks up where Yori has left off again. Ienzo might almost accuse them of having given this speech before. (How many programs, exactly, had been derezzed trying to restore Tron?) "In the end, the system restores were only able to try and outfit his code with similar data—but it wasn't a close enough match. Without his original files, Tron can't function. And the system can't function correctly without him. The number of bugs is getting out of control, and none of the OS's functions in the User world are operable. We're heading for collapse."

"All of us," Ienzo mutters, to himself.

"With your system administrator access," Yori chimes, "you should be able to search the sealed directories for Tron's missing files."

With the VM and the Shade Archive together, he should be able to locate the errors and decode the passwords of locked files. It is possible. And if Tron is as capable as they claim—if he can fight the creeping Darkness here—what can this savior program do for Radiant Garden?

"Will you do it?" Yori asks.

Ienzo nods. He doesn't expect her to shout in glee and bound over to hug him. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" she says beside his covered ear, holding tight. Somehow, it doesn't seem fair that he keeps getting surprised by_ programs _when _people_ are so boringly predictable.

He doesn't know how long this will take, or if anyone from Radiant Garden is in this world looking for him yet. He hopes they have the good sense not to wander into a nest of bugs. And what might be happening in the real world? How much time has passed? All of this together means he needs to get to work and work quickly. Yori leads him over to the platform and undocks Tron's identity disc, which she reverently hands to Ienzo with only a little hesitation.

Ienzo settles down near the base of the platform so he can lean back against it for support. He analyzes the identity disc with the VM and is immediately assaulted by a tremendous amount of code he can't even begin to fathom without the help of his new, mysterious book. There are errors marked off in red everywhere. It is going to take him _hours_. Holding the identity disc above it, Ienzo triggers the Shade Archive, which falls open to a page near the middle and begins to scroll definitions and directories. Ienzo executes his primary function, and wishes the others were here to compliment his impeccable research skills.

— —

A long time later, Yori interrupts him to tell him Ram's Bit has caught up with them, and Ienzo is going to probably less than politely tell her that he doesn't give two bits himself when a wild silver isometric shape comes hurtling through the door, followed by Ram, who looks a little like a boy who has just been reunited with his lost puppy.

"This is my Bit," Ram announces rather needlessly, and the Bit loudly declares "YES!" morphing spastically into a spikier, golden shape as it does so. Immediately after it's lost its points, it circles Ram and cuddles up next to his neck. Ienzo gets the slightly disarming feeling that it is watching him, only it doesn't have any eyes. "Bit might be able to help you a little," Ram suggests, and the Bit just as quickly leaps over the empty space to circle Ienzo, just as boldly repeating "Yes, yes, yes, yes!"

The Bit is useful, and speeds up the process greatly by keeping track of the changes to the code Ienzo has already tried, letting him know, by vehement negative or positive answers, whether or not he's already changed one variable or another. It's a little less like flying blind, which is sort of ironic, given the established lack of eyes.

Still later, Ram returns, and for a half second, Ienzo is afraid they're going to have to fight over the Bit, because he's growing a little fond of it (even more so its usefulness) and certainly won't give it up until the project is done. But Ram just sits down next to him and hands over a tall, narrow glass full of a brilliantly glowing liquid. "It's pure energy," he explains. "You looked like you could use a pick-me-up."

Ienzo eyes the drink skeptically, for various reasons. "Don't worry," Ram insists, "I've seen a User drink it before. You'll be fine." That wasn't actually the primary reason. But Ram takes a drink of his own glass and the effects are alarmingly instantaneous, a pretty, healthy glow flaring across his circuits—all of which seem to have been repaired, possibly through Yori's clearly careful attention—and yes, Ienzo could use something to bring himself back up to par, the words on both of his screens starting to blur into dangerous messes.

But Even won't even let him touch coffee in Radiant Garden, and whatever's in this glass looks quite a bit stronger than coffee. Maybe there's no minimum drinking age here? He hasn't even seen any other child programs. Ram looks quite serious about him taking it, even a little perplexed that he is hesitating. So, mostly because he has been working an uncountable number of hours and has an uncountable number of hours still to go, Ienzo takes the pure liquid energy and sips it.

Everything heats up with a sort of pleasant tingling, the scrapes he picked up in the fight with the bugs and the dim pain of his hand—which neither of the adult programs has any idea needs treatment—numb a bit, not healed but distant, and Ienzo takes a much larger sip.

Before Ienzo knows how it happened, the glass is empty, and he's leaning against Ram's side laughing his head off while Ram recounts his first trip to the games. He would have found it funny no matter what the situation, but at the moment it is the most hilarious thing he's ever heard, and the only sobering thought Ienzo has is that it might be the most hilarious thing he's ever heard even without the bubbling excitement of a pure energy rush—because he's never had anyone to share silly stories with; his father always too serious, too worried, too busy, his mother cautiously (incorrectly) assessing what might be appropriate for his age, his tutors paid too well to socialize, and there's that whole part about the world falling out under their feet which just keeps interrupting any of the attempts at happiness he'd really like to make. Because he'd like that. To be happy. To be in a place with people that always make him feel this sort of perfect lightness and fizziness inside, which grows near painful in his chest unless he laughs it free, delighted enough in the sound to start the whole process again.

"Thanks Ram," he says, and means more than the drink.

"You really are a User," Ram responds, not like it means he feels obligated, but like it means the world to him. Of course, then he ruffles Ienzo's hair and the friendship thing is back to getting old. Ienzo flails a little at Ram's enormous offending hand until the older program takes it away, still, always, laughing.

— —

He feels like it's been days, only he doesn't seem to need sleep here, only energy, and although he's a little dismayed he's heard no word from Radiant Garden, he's still determined to worry about the detrimental effects drinking nothing but liquid electricity might ultimately have on his human body.

The work has become mindless, which doesn't really make any sense considering it consists of math problems and programming languages he doesn't even actually know, translated back and forth by a magical book and a talking rubik's cube, which should require some input somewhere. But after so long, he's simply shut it down, made the calculations rote and the typing completely mechanical. He's so far gone into other thoughts by now—primarily imaginings about Tron's capabilities outside the virtual world, and any number of ways those connection capabilities might be employed—that he doesn't even notice the VM ping loudly in his ear and announce that the last file required for basic functioning has been found.

Somewhere beside and above him, the Bit cheers "YES YES YES!" and starts dancing. Ienzo stares down at the page of the Shade Archive which he's actually never needed to turn, and the instructions end three lines down, right after telling him to copy the last needed files over into the proper sub-subfolder and run the boot up sequence. Ienzo copies the files over slowly, suspiciously (he cannot believe that is all that's required, no final bang or great wall to overcome?). When the files are copied, he sends the Bit to find Ram and Yori—who, it turns out, built the sim café the bugs trashed all by herself and was its sole somewhat harried staff member, all as a guise so that she could guard Tron's data.

The Bit's enthusiasm must have alerted them to the fact that the bulk of the work was done, because they both come running, stumbling into the room so fast they might as well be fleeing from a hoard of angry bugs behind.

"Are you finished?" Yori breathes, barely able to raise her voice, maybe from fear that saying it too loud will break the spell.

Ienzo nods.

"Run the boot up," Ram says, watching Tron's now correctly reassembled but frozen form where it stands still on the platform. Yori moves to help Ienzo stand—he can't actually remember how many days ago it was he last moved—and he uses the VM's run function to initiate the boot up sequence on the identity disc still caught in his grip.

The disc flares promisingly, a clean, familiar, calming blue. With trembling hands, Yori reaches out, takes the disc, and docks it on Tron's back. They both step around the platform weakly, though for different reasons, to watch Tron's face.

For a long moment, nothing happens. Then Ienzo notices it, just beginning at the tips of Tron's boots, a flicker and then a surge of brightness, lighting the dim circuitry lines to a steady, brilliant glow. The glow spreads upwards from Tron's feet, across his chest where it lights his stylized T, and from the back of his helmet to the front, so that the light converges where his face still lies slack, and then his eyelids flutter and open.

Tron stares at them blearily, dazed and blinking slowly, but then something makes it through to him quickly: "Yori," he says, and smiles. Whatever power was holding him upright gives out the moment he tries to move, but it doesn't matter because before his knees can even buckle, Yori is there, letting him lean on her and giggling, making some soothing, electronic cooing sound at the same time, her hands tracing his face like she can't believe he's blinking again, then fluttering away to clutch at his back in a desperate hug.

Tired, disoriented, still not running at anywhere near his full capacity, Tron nevertheless manages to return the surprised delight, hugging her so tightly she has to stand on tip-toe to keep them both from falling over.

"Get a private server, why dontcha!" Ram cat-calls, but he's clearly a half-second from grabbing them both up into an enormous hug of his own. Tron looks up, manages a grin. "Ram!" he calls, maybe a little muffled and subdued but nonetheless brimming with love for his friend.

That's all it takes. Ram has grabbed both Tron and Yori up in a fantastic group hug. With one hand, he pats Yori lightly on the back; the other hand, curled into a fist, gives Tron a few masculine thumps on the back, right beside the older program's strongly glowing identity disc. When he finally steps back, it's only to give Yori the space to start helping Tron move, making promises all the while that there's enough pure energy stored in the false café to get him back on his own feet in no time.

But by the time Tron's gotten half way through the room, however, he doesn't seem to care too much about himself (_Are all heroes altruistic to a flaw? _Ienzo wonders), instead peering down at Ienzo with a curious, intrigued look that says, at least, some of his finer search functions have been restored.

Ram spooks Ienzo by sneaking around him and marching him forward with hands on both his shoulders until Ienzo stands directly before Tron, eye to eye if not for the three and a half feet Tron easily has on him.

"This is the User Ienzo," Ram announces with no small degree of pride or vanity at having been the one to discover Ienzo. "He's the system administrator who restored your missing files."

Tron blinks owlishly, his eyes wide. "A User, huh? Sorry to meet you in such bad circumstances, but I am sure glad you came."

Ienzo bites his bottom lip just a little and nods. There's that whole thing about no accidents in life, isn't there?

Yori tsk-tsks. "We can talk more when you're up and running, Tron!" She takes firm steps toward the hall, and Tron goes stumbling after her, shaking his head but smiling.

The wonderful thing about programs, of course, is that "up and running" can occur in seconds. Although it takes Tron a fair bit longer, and a fair bit of giggling into high ball glasses too, it seems like an eye blink before the other program is functioning as well as he will be, moving easily and listening intently as Ram and Yori catch him up on everything that happened to the system while he slept. Ienzo sits silently, petting the Bit when it bumps his hands, and offering input only when it is absolutely necessary—except when the topic of Radiant Garden arises.

"The bugs aren't restricted to your system," he murmurs. "Radiant Garden is under attack too." From under his bangs and the screen of the VM, Ienzo watches Tron's hands close to fists on the café counter (fully restored, of course, thanks to Yori's routine back-ups).

Tron's face is a hardened, determined mask. "If I can get to the CPU, I should be able to restore the rest of my non-primary functions and debug Radiant Garden OS. My security system was never designed just with our world in mind. Alan-One designed me to watch-dog the Users' world as well. If I can contact User Ansem and get his input, we should be able to get the town's security system back online. That should be more than enough to clean up your bug problem."

It's probably the best news Ienzo's ever heard in his admittedly short life. Ram looks equally raring to go. "How soon can we move out?" He stops just shy of simply jumping out of his seat and making for the door.

Tron snorts. "Well, I'm not getting any better sitting here running half my routines. Are you ready now?" He looks across at Ienzo too, and earns himself a nod.

Behind the counter, Yori throws her hands in the air and sighs as loud as she can. "Gladiators!" she groans. "Did you two think for a second that the mesa's bound to be swarming with bugs?"

Ram looks at Tron. Tron looks at Ram. "We're well aware," they chime through identical, easy grins.

"And how are you going to get there?" Ienzo can't see her feet but he swears he hears an angry foot tapping. She's even got one doubtful eyebrow raised.

"No worries," Ram insists. "My baton's got the 3-man Light Jet installed." He reaches around to his back for the baton, only, of course, his hand comes up empty. "Huh?"

Ienzo clutches the Shade Archive tighter. He doesn't really want to give it back, the book of a hundred million secrets, everything laid out for once in aching clarity, at last the answer to every surprise question, to every fear or worry—

But it isn't his. And if Tron doesn't get to the CPU, he won't be able to protect Radiant Garden. Ienzo has to give it back.

Eyes downcast, he puts the book on the counter and nudges it toward Ram. "When I activated the baton, it became this. I don't know how to change it back." Ienzo almost flinches when Ram picks up the lexicon. The program turns the book this way and that, sliding and tapping everywhere on it in an attempt to find the missing keyboard.

"You know…" he says, after many failed attempts, "I'm not sure how to change it back either."

"I'm sorry," Ienzo mumbles, accepting the book back. He's not _that_ sorry.

"Don't be," Tron interjects. "Without that book, we'd all be on a blown fuse. We'll just have to find another way."

It's silent for a long moment, except for the Bit's dejected "No, no, no…" Then Yori clears her throat.

"You know," she says primly, "the cargo area's not far from here. The Solar Sailor's been in dock there for a while."

Both Ram and Tron's heads dart up to stare at her, taken back. It occurs to Ienzo a little belatedly that she's suggesting they steal a vehicle. He suspects Yori has more bite than anyone gives her credit for.

Tron says, "I can always count on you," and that seems to decide it.

— —

The Solar Sailor is massive, resting like a sleek, black dragonfly on the thin line of the data stream. It seems long out of service, and the only guards are a few cargo bay employees milling about the enormous hangar doing something that looks suspiciously like nothing. Stacks of covered cargo dot the floor, enough that their party can slink from shadow to shadow, sliding their feet along to keep from clanking on the metal planks beneath.

They've made it to the elevator bay before anyone notices.

"Hey!" a program calls out from half way across the hangar. "Who are you?!"

The breath-taking elevator jerks into motion immediately, and they're rocketing up to the Solar Sailor faster than Ienzo can see, everything a blur of black and neon. The elevator stops on a dime and releases them onto a narrow gangway, barely a railing on either side. The elevator seems ready to plunge back down, probably summoned by the hangar workers below, but Tron passes his identity disc over the elevator call pad, which flashes red, and the elevator creaks to a stop.

Ram hustles Ienzo along the gangway, chasing Yori, and Tron marches behind them, his disc in his hand, ready to handle any pursuers. The walkway isn't long, and before he even realizes it—everything uniform black and glowing blue—they're on the top gangway of the Solar Sailor, clanking along its metal spine toward the control screens behind the transparent, venous wings.

"Can you fly this thing?" Ram asks when Yori starts pecking at the controls with gusto. She looks up, tosses her head, scoffs.

"I was written to fly this thing."

It seems she isn't exaggerating either. The Solar Sailor powers on in a rush, blue circuitry flaring to life all down the long, thin form. The engines are turning steadily by the time the elevator starts to move again behind them. In one smooth, swift movement, the Solar Sailor takes off, drawn along the data transmission beam running through it to swim languorously through the air. Outside the hangar, with a host of angry programs chasing along after it on the ground, the Solar Sailor's wings unfurl and flash, and suddenly their slow, smooth flight is something much, much closer to light speed. Ienzo wishes there were something to hold on to, even if the wind arches away over the top of the wings.

At the top speed of the transport ship, the flight to a dock on the mesa is short and uneventful; Ienzo refuses to look over the side, thank you, though Ram and Tron spend a long time counting bugs crossing the uninhabited outlands below them.

Yori docks the ship expertly, and then Tron and Ram are racing ahead, because clearly someone has warned the workers at this dock that they are coming; a crowd is already waiting, holding weapons that look too much like Braig's arrowguns for comfort. Worse, their routines are not refined enough to think to ask questions first and shoot second.

But Ram is not _the _gladiator for nothing, and it seems _he _only got the title because Tron was sleeping, because the two of them are like a well-oiled machine, identity discs deflecting the rain of fire back at their hosts with a spray of sparks and pixels, and the gaps they make in the line are enough for Yori and Ienzo to race through, guarded back and front, and then they are out of the hangar and on to the long, dark mesa.

Tron, dodge rolling out of the hangar last, pauses just long enough to attack the control panel for the wide opening they sailed the ship through; it shutters closed instantly and stays that way, despite the pounding of the programs on the other side.

Ram whoops. "Boy am I glad to have you back!"

"It's good to be back," Tron retorts, and he's already surging ahead, heading for an immense, sharply angled building bursting with beams of light far ahead of them.

And now they're running. Really, he's digitized himself and ridden jets and metal dragonflies and saved a computer program's somehow existent life, and at the end of the day, Ienzo still ends up just running. Fair is not in his life's lexicon.

They are nearly there—and at least he doesn't tire here, even if he has to take twice as many steps to keep up with the adults—when the Valkyria Mono pings. And pings again, again, and again.

Ienzo whirls around, looks back, and catches sight of a huge host of bugs skittering toward them and rapidly closing. From the corner of his eye, Ram must have caught the movement, because he turns to look back too and snarls.

"Tron, company incoming!"

"I know," is all Tron says, and keeps running forward.

Ienzo tries harder, keeps pace with Yori at least and he's almost sure they are going to make it when an enormous shadow falls on them all. A towering black spike pierces the ground of the mesa directly between them and the CPU. The force of the impact throws them all off balance, scattering and rolling. Tron is back on his feet in seconds, flexible as an acrobat, but it's only from the knocked askew vantage point, flat on his back with the identity disc pressing hard against his spine, that Ienzo can look up and up to find what it is that's fallen.

It's the leg of a colossal bug. The VM tells him, in text that actually somehow feels a little frantic, that this bug has a volume of five times ten to the thirteenth pixels, this is a bug affecting one of the I/O Tower Guardians, whoever they are, and that it is devouring data at a rate of 23 GB/s, which is just about all Ienzo needs to know. Ram is hacking at its numerous legs, trying to rip a path through the wall it has made with its own coded flesh, and he's making a literal dent in the being but the progress is slow, too slow, and the other bugs will be on them soon; where did Tron_ go_—

From on high, Ienzo hears a firm, carrying voice shout, "Not today!" and he looks over and up to his right in time to see Tron, precariously balanced on the monster's head, plunge his identity disc into one massive, roving eye of the bug. There's an ear-splitting shriek of metal on metal and the bug begins to frantically kick and writhe, and it rains circuitry and light. Ienzo watches Tron flip lithely off the back of the monster, dropping like a stone through the air only to wrap his arms around one flailing leg, and using the identity disc as his grip point, zip toward the ground again. On the other side of the beast, Tron rolls to his feet, waving them on through the maze of thrashing limbs. Ienzo collects himself quick enough to join Yori and Ram in charging after him; Ienzo could end this with the Shade Archive, but only if he has enough time to hunt through the code and find the error, translate it back and forth—he needs_ time_, and they don't have it—the giant bug is already rallying, shivering still but no longer seizing, and in its long shadow, a hundred bugs are eating up the ground between them, less than a minute from swarming and swallowing them whole—

"Get to the CPU," Ram shouts, waving fiercely back over his shoulder. That's right. If they mean to end this in one swift blow, they won't even have Tron; he needs to integrate his identity disc with the CPU to affect the system as a whole—no weapon, no warrior king, just Ienzo and Ram and Yori who is great at running simulations but carries no disc or baton of her own, and no time even for Ienzo to rectify the enemy from the ground up.

Still, they have to try. Ram swallows deeply, but turns to face their enemy with a brave, unshakeable glare. Tron, for a moment, looks torn, but their situation will be no less futile with him here anyway, and he can do so much more good than this—he nods solemnly, then turns and sprints for the glowing tower of the CPU.

Ienzo moves to stand beside Ram, and doesn't expect the hand that reaches out to ruffle his hair.

"You're not a program," Ram says, although what he means is they have no idea what will happen if the bugs get to Ienzo, if he'll be immune or if he'll die just the same, with no code, no creator, no back-up to ever bring him back.

Well he's been in the near-death place so often, he's not even frightened anymore.

"Um…" A sudden thought strikes him, and he reaches back his own free hand (the lexicon trapped under the other) to peel the identity disc of his back. "Can you use this too?"

Ram takes the disc reverently, like he's been handed an ancient religious artifact. Probably a User's disc does qualify. "You'd trust me with this?" the program asks.

Ienzo manages a little smile. "I'm not a program," he says. "My identity… is decided only by me." His identity which above all has never been anything but fragile may have been strengthened by the disc—by this world which should not exist, peopled by beings that should not exist and yet do, unreal, unseen, but living, beautiful and worthwhile nonetheless. The dream made manifest. His identity is no less tangible than theirs then, and freer too because he doesn't have to be the sum of his traumatic experiences. He only has to be what he chooses at any moment to be: boy, apprentice, User, son, orphan, genius, hallucination or fantasy and all of those at once, made flesh, made data, made real.

He opens the Shade Archive, and it drifts before his outstretched hands, willing and ready, all this world's wording spilled open and pliable before him to remake as he sees fit.

"It's been nice knowing you, byte." Ram raises both identity discs, tenses.

"I'd prefer it if you died another day," Ienzo gets to say, and then the bugs are on them.

Everything is a blur of motion and light, the stark contrast of moving shadow and shifting glow, darkness and bright, the identity discs cutting the very air in long glimmering ribbons, whipped from Ram's arms and shooting off or through the pixel flesh of bug after bug, and every few seconds Ienzo gets clear enough to correct another line of code, inching closer and closer to resolving the conflicts in calculations that produced all these aberrations in the first place, but it's never enough time, never enough space, and he's knocked off his feet an uncountable number of times, his uniform not hard enough material to keep from ripping on their claws, little scores and drag marks opening, bleeding, and sometimes the only thing that keeps him from being impaled is hauling the massive lexicon around—not with his hands, he doesn't know how he's holding it really, magic or energy he can't even tell anymore—and pounding its hard metal-tipped edges against the encroaching bugs.

But it's a losing battle. The massive bug is slower than the others but it hasn't stopped to play with them and is creeping its ominous way to the CPU, which has only just now begun to glow from Tron's connection. They have no way to defeat the giant bug without first defeating its hoard of literal underlings, and they won't be able to do so in time. The glaring error will trap Tron against the CPU and eliminate him and Yori while they are defenseless. Then, if the vile mass of monsters already swarming them hasn't overwhelmed Ienzo and Ram yet, it will turn around, turn around and swallow them whole in the masticating pulpy and metal bits it calls a mouth.

Ienzo throws himself into the fight more fiercely, and he may be small but that doesn't seem to make a difference in the power behind the heavy weight of the lexicon cutting through the air, only when he attacks with it he can't read it, and he needs to read it if he actually wants to kill them, instead of just buy some time. If only he could… The lexicon halts in midair, opens, and begins to violently tear itself apart, pages fluttering as if caught in a living wind, slicing out toward the bugs and then harrying back to him to be read and it's so blessedly convenient he doesn't know how he'll ever live without the thing in the real world if he ever makes it back to the real world again—

Ienzo is so caught up in reading, rewriting, attacking, and putting the book at his back to guard that it takes him too long—a millisecond too long—to realize that the terrible, echoing clanging he's just heard is both identity discs hitting the ground, and Ram is still struggling but the bulk of the bugs have knocked him back and knocked his weapons free, and there's not enough space for him to rise without half leaping into the mouths of the beasts; they are converging on him—

Ienzo runs. Ienzo runs and it doesn't make sense that it seems to take so long when he knows he's only constricted by the speed of electricity down fiber optics, the speed of light itself even, but it feels as if a thousand tons are resting on his shoulders, and it doesn't matter what happens to him if just keeps losing and losing every single person he cares about.

Ienzo reaches Ram with the lexicon like a great black bird behind him, wings and reams of paper and black leather or metal or no material on earth caught and spun in a terrible furious rush of magic—his magic, defending, protecting—spiraling like a dark whirlwind long enough to knock them all back.

But it isn't enough. Ienzo puts himself between the bugs and Ram but he's little more than a momentary distraction, and he opens the book before himself to be their last paltry line of defense but he can't hold back this amassed number even if he throws every ounce of power he holds into it. The nearest bugs rear up, claws and terribly jointed limbs green and red tipped in the blackness like poison, like blood.

Ienzo closes his eyes.

There's the sound of ice cracking. There's the sound of ice cracking and then a wicked barrage of gun fire and the roar of wind. The ground beneath his feet trembles. Ienzo opens his eyes and can't see anything but a brilliant curve of ice blue, and he follows the line of this up until he finds a slender arm attached to a slender black uniformed body and Even is there. Even is there glaring down at him and then he is ripping his shield out of the crack it has made in the mesa and forcing it through the body of the nearest bug.

The VM is telling Ienzo all kinds of things but nothing will compute. Ienzo shifts his head the barest amount, slowly, and beyond Even he watches Braig hang upside down off nothing, walking on the sky, sniping down at the bugs with terrible accuracy, while Aeleus bats away the monsters by the tens, every swing sending insect bodies flying. Dilan is drifting on an enormous gale, accosting the head of the giant bug with all of his lances at once, darting and swinging easy as feathers.

Back beyond all of them, Master Ansem stands in a uniform that perfectly mirrors his real world black and red battle regalia, typing and typing at a keyboard made of light. The bugs nearest to him burst into grotesque shapes, distorted, morphed entirely into something else by recoding; they turn on their kin and begin to devour them.

Ienzo feels his knees give out underneath him but it doesn't even matter that he is utterly defenseless now because the tide has turned, the victory has been decided, and Ram is shivering awake beside him, forcing himself upright, and the older program actually stops for a second, barely balanced on his hands, and a takes a moment to reach up and rub his eyes like he can't believe what he is seeing. "Are they _all_ Users?" he asks himself, and if it weren't for the fact that he looks a little like death warmed over, Ienzo might accuse him of having a faith-based experience right then and there.

But there's still the matter of the enormous bug. Dilan's lances aren't as effective as Tron's identity disc was. Even Aeleus, who has joined Dilan and is hacking away at the monster's legs, can only do so much: for every leg he swings away at, the others keep working and working, dragging it closer and closer to the CPU. It's too big for Ienzo or probably even Ansem to debug. They need Tron, which means they need to buy time.

"Ram," Ienzo pulls at the program. "Come with me!" He stumbles to his feet and tries to drag Ram after, the two of them weaving around dying bugs and bugs still all too alive and kicking, heading for the giant monster's damaged range of sight. They make it out from under the shade of the beast and Ienzo points up and up. "Get its attention!" he calls over the sounds of battle.

"You're a short circuit, you know that?" Ram says, but he's got a _hell if I can't_ grin on and he rears a mile back and slings an identity disc right at one of the monster's still working eyes. The gash it cuts is enormous, and pixels shower down like golden and red rain. The bug shrieks its metal on metal howl again and contorts to look down on them, its head straining and stretching its wire and light muscles.

Ienzo takes one step forward. The Shade Archive drifts before him, fluttering in an easy wind that's no real breeze but the quiet inner pulse of his power which runs from deep inside him outward to the ends of his fingers, a cold, electrical pulse, and this is the part where he should be afraid, where the dark curling panic should crawl its way up his throat because he can't control it, can't make it do his bidding, can't separate reality from nightmare, and he'll take them all with him, everyone—

But he's felt this power, suspended, quiet, trembling in the back of his mind since the moment the lexicon appeared and it has been growing and growing under his skin, quiescence, tamed, waiting.

It isn't for him. It isn't for him this time but for Tron, for all of the programs, for the apprentices, the master, for the Radiant Garden.

And he is not alone. When it is all over, there will be someone at his back to tell him whether the battle was really won or if he dreamed it. Whether all the wolves are gone. And when his heart at last stops racing and he first starts to believe, he can look to the Shade Archive and it will tell him the_ truth_, always and forever, the division between the dream of the butterfly and the butterfly dreaming as clear as the symbolic division between black ink and the pristine white page, everything, always in a language he can master.

So that he can master anything, especially himself.

The magic rushes inside him like a storm, the Midnight Anklet burns hot and pleasant on his leg, and words appear on a blank page in the lexicon written in a soft, welcoming hand:

_I think, therefore I am_.

In breath, in a language not word but power, Ienzo says, "You cannot see us." All his circuitry flashes ultraviolet.

The bug shudders to a halt; everything shudders to halt, every bug on the battlefield, the apprentices, Ram, the master. Then, from far above and behind Ienzo, Braig says something not fit for children's ears.

"Where are my legs?!" he shouts. "Hyne on a stick, where's the rest of me?!"

Even is shouting across the battlefield then too: "Where are _any_ of you? I can't see anyone!"

But Ienzo just watches the bug, which is trying very hard to watch him. Only the illusion is working, it seems, and the bug scans the ground where it knows he was standing and finds nothing. It twitches a leg to sweep across the spot, but working totally blind, it's easy to avoid it. There's a long moment where the giant bug jerks in place, a whirling of servos from somewhere inside it, and then the booming, panicked voice of the program it has overtaken mechanically announces "Targets have disappeared. Determination: Targets are gone. Have targets been derezzed? No. Have targets run? No. Have targets escaped? No. ERROR. Flawed logic. Targets cannot be gone without escaping or derezzing. ERROR. Targets have not escaped. Flawed logic. Targets must have escaped. ERROR. Recompute. Determination: Targets are gone. ERROR. Targets cannot be gone."

He's triggered the logic loop. The bug is frozen.

"TRON!" Ram bellows, and the CPU behind them explodes with light, a great towering beam burning so bright Ienzo's shadow is visible on the floor for a mile stretched out before him, blacker than the black of the not-stone tiling. A thin, merciless ribbon of light, blazing, explodes from the pillar of the CPU and arcs over their heads. It rips through the massive bug in a single blow, cleaving it in two, and the bug derezzes in a fireworks show to rival any Ienzo has ever seen in Radiant Garden, pixels blown out a mile and drifting on the wind. Below it, the other bugs shrink back from the encroaching light of the CPU, shrivel and derezz.

The light angles and tears a path through the air back toward the CPU. Ienzo turns just in time to watch Tron step out of the processing unit and catch his identity disc, swinging it around just one finger and blowing it off like a smoking gun. Beside him, Yori says something which, from the distance, looks like "Show off."

Ienzo looks to the Shade Archive. There, splashed across its pages, is a full summary of the spell he's used, every detail laid out in all his favorite scientific jargon, simple and comprehensible and so he knows (just like he knows that axis, not the distance of the world, makes it winter) he can _undo_ it and he lets the magic go in a rush, the illusion dripping off their skins like liquid that runs off the backs of birds, vanishing into the floor.

In seconds, he is surrounded, first by a crushing hug from Ram and then by the other apprentices.

Dilan says something like "I suppose you should be commended for thinking to leave a message at all."

To which Braig readily scoffs. "Uh, how 'bout no? Do you have any idea how many dim automatons we had to ask on the Game Grid before we found one who told us you left with the champion program?" Braig eyes Ram, and Ram returns the favor, like nothing so much as two tomcats puffing up for a turf war. "What's with these weirdoes anyways?" Braig gestures vaguely with an arrowgun between Ram and Tron and Yori, who are quickly approaching. "Didn't anyone ever teach you about stranger danger, kiddo? And didn't I say I needed you alive?"

Aeleus towers over all of them, just shaking his head. "I'm glad you're safe, Ienzo," he says at last, and Ienzo is amazed to find how sorely he missed Aeleus—and has, somehow, been missed.

Then, with a subtle clearing of his throat, Ansem makes the other apprentices give way, and stands looking down at Ienzo with a face torn between relief and intrigue, human joy and scientific curiosity simultaneously piqued. "Was that your power which hid us?" he asks. Ienzo nods, clutches the Shade Archive close. Oddly enough, he finds it a little hard now, all of the sudden, to use his voice, and he doesn't know how to convey to the master—to any of them—how much it means that the faith he placed in them was kept, that for once he had not filled his own heart with empty promises but had his trust renewed. For someone so very good with words, he finds there aren't any in their language which mean the things he wants to say.

_Thank you_, maybe, or a long leap beyond _gratitude_, content and for once—for once—happiness boiling up along his circuits past his heart to fill his chest with the same sort of bursting lightness put there by pure energy, rising and rising.

Even leans down, extends something white out right in front of Ienzo's face, and says, a little gruffly, "Here."

Ienzo has to take it and hold it a bit away from his face to realize what it is.

It's a thin stack of white computer paper, probably the very same stack he was stretching for when he activated the digitizing laser.

"You could have just asked," Even sniffs.

It's too much. Ienzo laughs, crystal clear and maybe a bit too loud, and the sound takes everyone by such surprise that they all look down at him with the stupidest faces, which doesn't help his situation any, and soon he can't stop, stands on the digital frontier with all his favorite people in any world right there near him, laughing and laughing.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

But the following days outside the computer are a study in stark contrast, a whirl of working with Master Ansem and Tron and desperately hunting for each and every missing line of code necessary to bring Radiant Garden's security system to life, while reports of the missing or wounded or dead grow more frequent every day, more and more fiends from Lunar Cry are seen within the city. Dilan brings back daily reports of unrest, of groups amassing in the streets that speak lowly amongst themselves and spare shifting glances for anyone else who passes. There are talks of star cults and insurrection.

There is talk of democracy.

But they are so close. It doesn't save those already lost to the fiends, but if they can only get this system operational, they can turn back the Cry, purge the monsters from the Garden and prevent them from returning; when safety is restored, so too will order be.

Ienzo clings to this hope, working feverishly, even as the faces of the other apprentices begin to harden and fall, even Braig careful to look over his shoulder when he puts his back to the people in the streets. Ienzo does not leave the castle; he doesn't have to see the world falling out beneath their feet, and for this reason, he lasts the longest in pretending they haven't sealed themselves up in the last bastion of light and left the rest of the world to pound screaming at the gates while the wolves run amongst them, culling the youngest—

He works at the mainframe endlessly, some uncountable number of hours in a row each day, speaking to Tron and Ram through the reestablished connections, deep in the heart of the castle where nothing—not even the voices of the people—can hope to reach.

Until the day it becomes impossible to ignore. Until the day it becomes too late.

It's only bad luck that he's out of the computer room at that moment, sent to search for one of the castle's few hard-copies of documents, and it's only because he's heading to the master's office that he spots Dilan moving slowly down the main corridor, literally dragging someone behind him. The body slumped awkwardly on Dilan's shoulder is small, too small really, for the trooper's uniform thrown haphazardly over it. The edges of the uniform, and the wearer's hands, look burned or blackened by soot, and there's a strange, heavy scent slithering along the edges of the hallway toward him that Ienzo takes a long time to realize is blood.

The primary attachment of the soldiers was due back from the retreating front today.

Ienzo feels like he is falling and falling, and his legs won't move at first to follow, won't move until Dilan has inched past at last, and then Ienzo cloaks himself from sight and hurries after, keeping just far enough back that he can also slip in the door to the master's office when Dilan throws it open wide to drag his burden with him.

The master looks up from the letter he was writing—to whom? Are there any allies left in this world? Is it a letter to worlds Beyond?—and the look that darts across his face as he eyes the wounded trooper leaning against Dilan is so bleak and barren it may as well be Darkness itself, coiling in corners of his eyes and the harsh down curve of his mouth so that his countenance is suddenly impossibly unapproachable, monstrous and bereft.

It is gone within a second but the sensation of despair lingers like a second skin, an eel writhing in beneath the illusion Ienzo has pulled as tightly around himself as a security blanket, and the feeling of it leaves him shaken. The master does not despair. The master does not waver or give up.

(The whole world has been falling apart, but until this moment, it wasn't falling apart for him.)

"Tell me it is not true," Master Ansem murmurs, with all the air of a dreamer asking not to wake. He knows already. He has steepled his fingers and, resting his elbows on the desk, hides his mouth behind his joined hands like the agony and rage and fear itself can be contained by flesh and bone. 

Dilan shakes his head. "The early reports pouring in are correct. Save a scant few survivors, the Odin and Minerva units have been decimated by unknown enemies. What intelligence we have gathered from the remaining soldiers, including this _Cadet Strife_," he shifts his shoulder to move the wounded trooper, "suggests the assailants were not fiends, but some other type of monster all together."

Their soldiers decimated, their last outer line of defense breached—not by the enemy they are a stone's throw from defeating but by something else entirely? Ienzo cannot breathe. He can barely hold the spell in place, barely keep his feet under him. _How_ is this happening?

Before his thoughts can begin to spiral ceaselessly, the door behind them creaks open again, and Kairi's grandmother peers through the doorway. "I was told to hurry here by Aeleus?" she asks, peering about in consternation before she discovers the motionless trooper draped over Dilan and steps forward to him quickly as her skirts and old bones allow. "Oh dear," she says, and for a long moment that's all she says, staring at the young man's partially covered face and touching his deathly pale cheeks.

Finally, she turns to face the master, and her gaze is just as terrible, heartbroken and ominous. "This boy has had the Darkness forcibly stripped from his heart," she announces, "but not cleansed. He is broken…" She falters, shrinks in her shawl. "I don't know any monsters that could do this. But… but a Keyblade might."

Dilan stares at her like he wishes to kindly show her off the edge of a cliff. "Keyblades breed nothing but a calamity against which there is no defense. The end of all worlds and the final fall of Darkness."

"That is only half the story, and you know it," she reminds him firmly.

"And yet," he grimaces, "it is the only half that matters to the trembling hearts of the plebeians. What shall we tell them?" He gestures sharply to catch and hold the master's attention. "What shall we tell them when the men don't return home and everywhere there are whispers of weapons we cannot defeat? Shall we surrender already and admit that Heaven's dark harbinger has shown himself at last?"

Ansem's glare down at the polished surface of the desk is like crawling fire but he does not speak.

Dilan is not finished. "If we are not turned to ash and shadows by our enemies without, the Darkness in the hearts of our people will see us torn limb from limb. We are trapped—by walls, by oceans, by a burden poised at any moment to bite the hand which has so well fed it."

Kairi's grandmother looks as if she wants to disagree, only she has been in the town, heard every half-whispered argument about how their castle gates are always locked, about how many rooms go empty while outside children disappear and men go mad under the sick bloody light of the lunatics' moon…

How long before they storm the castle? How long before it all falls down?

When Master Ansem at last speaks, he does not speak to Dilan or to Kairi's grandmother but to the trooper, and Ienzo looks between the two of them in confusion because he had honestly thought the young man was unconscious or half-dead. "What has happened to General Sephiroth and General Farron?"

The trooper's head lolls loosely, his heavy helmet seemingly suspended on a wire-thin neck, and Ienzo sees his throat working but no noise comes out for a long moment, and when at last the fledgling sounds bubble up into the boy's mouth, they're not words at first, they're just babble, groaning. Under this painful display, at last, Ienzo begins to hear something like a voice, and he makes out the message only after much repetition:

"They answered the call. Chaos and Cosmos. The call."

The voice is impossibly small, boyish, and it's startling for Ienzo to realize the boy isn't much older than he is, eleven or twelve maybe, too young by years to be wearing a trooper's uniform. Ansem's look of displeasure may not be strictly for the contents of the message. How have they all been so careless, so long?

Before any of the obvious questions can be asked—_Chaos, Cosmos_?—the heavy door behind them swings open again, only this time it is in a furious burst, and a tall man with short silver hair and a livid expression on his face charges, heedless of anyone else in the room, straight to Ansem's desk and slams both his hands down onto it, his leather pouches and blue tie going all askew.

"Where_ is_ she?"

"Director Estheim," the master says, bracingly—after that, it's chaos. There's a whirlwind of people talking over each other and more than a little shouting and Ienzo sticks closely to the side wall of the room half expecting Dilan and the director of research at the exploratory academy to come to blows at any second; indeed, it seems averted only by the presence of Kairi's grandmother. All the while, the too-young trooper mumbles ominous things about Darkness wandering free of the heart that birthed it in between unsettling nonsensical groans.

It's a long time before enough has been argued about that there's too little left to make a match over, and the director has put on a façade of mature calm, but when he leaves the room he is muttering portentous promises under his breath, and Dilan is a veritable storm leaving after him. Kairi's grandmother lingers in the room a moment longer, watching Ansem through her eyelashes.

The master presses hard against one temple. "I have done my best." He sounds tired, human.

"We must put our faith in the Light," she insists, reassuring.

Ansem only laughs, too loud, too deep, and too wry.

"The Light in the hearts of your people will keep them from giving up, even when faced with the deepest Darkness," she repeats. Against Ansem's hopeless self-mockery, it sounds like an empty condolence, trite and meaningless.

But Ansem seems to think on it a long while, or seems to have been thinking on it a long while already. "The hearts of the people… Yes, if we could sway them…" he muses aloud.

Kairi's grandmother nods, a motion which she turns into a very short bow, and she leaves too, allowing the master his time to think. Ienzo himself is so busy watching the thoughts race across the master's face in time to their speeding through his mind that he does not think about how _he_ will leave the room still hidden, and the door closes behind Kairi's grandmother with a heavy click of the knob.

Now he will have to wait until Master Ansem himself leaves, which could be tonight, tomorrow, or even days from now, at this rate. Well, maybe Ienzo can contrive some way to make it seem like he is coming in, not out—another illusion—

"Show yourself, Ienzo," the master says without warning or without even looking up from the dark surface of the table. "It seems wherever there is trouble, I find you hidden."

Ienzo does not jump a half foot in the air. It is nowhere near that high. He lets the illusion drop only after schooling his face into something appropriately sheepish-looking, but even so he knows it won't have any effect on the master, who is getting to know him too well. He's trapped now, and will have to accept some paltry punishment as prize.

But the master only looks sad and older than he should and like he has fallen under the weight of the world and then let that world slip between his fingers so that it is now hurtling through the abyss far beyond his control, all his fault, look how he let them all down—

He is trying too hard, taking on too much, and there is no solution for his suffering because there is no replacement—there is no other ruler, no other wise man, no better advisor, no better man. No escape. None of them would stand without him—now Ienzo least of all.

But what can Ienzo do? He is learning the magic by heart, by the book, but illusions cannot save an entire sinking country.

Ansem seems too weary to be upset by Ienzo's spying, or his thoughts are too far gone; when he looks over at Ienzo, it is as if he is still seeing through him, into some distance past or future.

"Come here," he says, and Ienzo slinks closer to the desk. He means to stand in front of it, only there is no chair and he is too short to see over the desk itself, has to stand too far back for that. So, reluctantly, he moves closer and stands near enough to Ansem that the master can reach out and touch his face (not unlike his father did on the long evenings when he was too tired to cart his son to bed and said his sweet dreams in the study instead, still reading even while he reached out to brush Ienzo's bangs from his face).

What Ansem says is not _I love you _but "What we need is time." The security system is all well and good, will be operational for the lantern festival in two nights, but if something greater is lurking—if something like a Keyblader is behind the first surge of Darkness that brought the monsters out in the first place, is behind the recent decimation of their forces, then a simple security system will not be enough. They need time to find the truth.

They need time to learn how to combat Darkness in its purest form.

But Ansem will be deposed long before then, and the castle overthrown and their research strewn out in the streets, the Tron system probably deconstructed for parts by greedy hands (and he does not want to lose that world, does not want to lose anyone else). The castle is his only home now, its inhabitants his only family.

What can he do?

The master is staring at his eyes specifically—Ienzo does not think they are exceptionally blue, but the others like to tease him—then there's an air of scientific method in Ansem's voice when he asks if Even has been able to run any tests on the captured information from Ienzo's use of magic in the virtual world.

Ienzo nods. "It becomes data," he says. Inside the virtual world, the spells work as they should but register as data which can be analyzed in the mainframe; it holds no interest for Ienzo, who can do the same with the lexicon, but Even and the master have been fascinated—Ansem enough so that he has begun to talk incessantly of digitizing other intangible things, like cure spells and ideas and hearts.

The master's face is impossible to read, which Ienzo has always found a little frightening in other human beings. Then Ansem says, "When the Tron System is fully reconfigured, it will be able to affect every part of the Garden." It's not a question, though Ienzo thinks it might have meant to be. Tron has said it enough times that it doesn't need any confirmation. There is no part of the Garden the program will not be able to protect, to monitor.

The master's throat works, one long swallow and then another, and then, looking away from Ienzo slightly, he speaks in the smallest voice Ienzo has ever heard from him. "If a spell were digitized, and uploaded to this system which affects our living world—"

Ienzo almost kicks himself. Why had he not thought of that? They could get any and every one of the apprentices to contribute offensive or defensive spells, curaga and blizzaga as needed, ready to be executed by the defense system at any time, packed into the very electric pulses designed to destroy monsters. It might not be enough to halt a Keyblader, but it would be able to destroy any slaves or monsters brought up from the Darkness to be aids or omens both…

It's brilliant. It's why Ansem is the master in the first place.

So why does Master Ansem not seem pleased?

The delight in the pit of Ienzo's stomach falters in its maiden flight.

When Ansem looks back at him, the master's eyes are narrow and his grimace so deep it splits his face like a seam. It is the look of a man who has made the hardest decision, just now decided which of his children will survive the long winter and which will not.

He says, "If your illusions were paired to this system, we could calm the hearts of the people and stave off the fiends long enough to find a cure for this Darkness."

Ienzo feels his blood run cold, feels his breath tear from his lungs like Dilan pulled it out with aeroga. The words replay again and again in his mind.

The master intends to trap an illusion in a jar, on a disc, in the very heart of the city, a dream or a fantasy or lie large enough to bound the whole, inescapable island prison of their nation, and he wants to open the box and let all the deceits and evils spill out and out on to the unsuspecting minds of the people. It will be some falsehood deep enough and long enough to undo their unrest, to change the very set of their minds from calls for freedom to loving adoration—the right to see and know and trust what one sees and knows utterly usurped, _stolen_, and no one any wiser, everything rose-tinted and _what does it matter if my son has disappeared, yes, I'm sure he'll be back soon because this is the Radiant Garden and nothing terrible ever happens here_—_no, this is a peaceful kingdom, and our ruler is a wise and kind man—_

_We want for nothing._

An Eden in the sea.

Ienzo feels himself gag but there's nothing churning in his stomach except bile trying to get out and if only _he_ could get out—but the master's hand is on his face (like his father's like his father's _you are not my son_ smoke and mirrors _you're a dead thing_ it's okay in dreams to kill the things you love) won't disappear and the look on Ansem's face says only that he's found the greater good at last and sometimes there is suffering even in paradise.

Ienzo wants to say no, but he can't find his voice and he wouldn't be heard anyway, and the worst part about it all is that the master isn't _wrong_. If rebellion is not quelled before it is born, they will lose _everything_—not just their way of life but their whole world, a hundred thousand men, women, and children sinking, screaming, into the blackness of the sea because they had been too afraid to wait for redemption on high.

If he can only make this world into sweetness and light, it will be all the time they need to save the majority.

But how many will be blinded, led stupidly like ancient sacrifices to be slaughtered on the fount of good intentions? So that what? So that they can keep their empty castle in the sky, their science, their magic, the throne?

He is shaking. Whether from fear or adrenalin or rage, he is shaking, and the master does nothing even though he must feel it, only looks more plaintive than ever, more weary, more faithful in his youngest's will to do what the master has found right.

"Ienzo," Ansem says, "I need you."

_Please Ienzo please my tactician my boy _

There is no way to win, to escape. They will lose some or they will lose all, and either way now it will be _Ienzo's _fault because he picked yes or he picked no when there was no other options given.

Why had he not died in the attic? Why had he become brave enough to try again?

Master Ansem is waiting but he already knows the answer, knew the answer before he ever knew the question, when he first kneeled down in the fountain garden and held the boy close to his heart, saying _You are safe now. No more_.

No more.

Ienzo looks up, _hates_, nods.

Ansem knows better than to give him the chance to run. He holds Ienzo's hand all the way deep into the core of the castle, where the computer waits.

And much later, when it is done and nothing can change it, Ienzo writes _Meet me at the Sector 3 bell tower at midnight_ on a scrap of paper, and sends it through the fire.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

There's the sound of a bell in the night. The air shivers, glints, as if a hundred million flakes of glass blew through it, vexed from dreamless sleep by the low, long tolling. His breath clouds and clears, an added layer of diamond dust in the hazy dark. Ienzo is so high up he can see the far off place where the late lit sconces on the outer wall shine gold and shivering on the surface of the sea. The bell rings again into its own echoes.

He sits on the edge of the bell tower and waits. It's midnight.

"Well whaddya know," a voice says behind him, lilting and the façade of upbeat, "the prodigal spy returns."

Ienzo wants to tell him that word doesn't mean what he thinks it means, but this is Lea, so when Ienzo turns to look back, he also steps away from the edge of tower, taking his precautions even as he brooks no argument.

"I did what you asked," Ienzo says, less defensive than a statement of fact; not even Lea can complain about the quality of his work. Indeed, the older boy steps clear of the stairwell— Ïsa like a shadow behind him still—and Lea (grinning, eyes like a cat's, somehow visible even in the dim, no matter the distance, like potion, like poison) flicks his wrist. There's an orange-white flare of flame in his palm and a scattering of sparks; then Lea grips the enormous stack of scraps and notes Ienzo sent through the candle and hearth, every overheard whisper and plan, careful explanation of every attempt to solve the problem (naturally, with a little excess care, a little revision: he has not said a word about Tron, or his own power).

"Not bad," Lea drawls, only it's not a compliment, fanning the pages as if putting out flames.

"Except now you have called us here," Ïsa murmurs, peering from behind Lea with a watchful, uncharitable eye, and Ienzo would accuse him of being the brains of the operation if Lea's smug, narrow-eyed grin were not twice as conniving and just as self-aware.

"Since your messages through the ash cannot be traced," Ïsa muses, "I suppose you have news for us not suited to notes." His arms are crossed over the golden moon resentfully patched on to the breast of his ubiquitous blue coat—the required mark of any man with moon sickness, lunacy. Ïsa looks… strained, far more frustrated than he had let himself appear at their first meeting, his measured calm not a characteristic now but a thin veneer. The full moon is only two or three days away.

"Has your little boy band up at the castle caught wind of the riot plan yet? Can't say I'm a fan of it myself," Lea tosses his head, rolls one shoulder idly, "but you know what they say about begging and choosing."

He's feeling Ienzo out, pretending to surrender information freely, stupidly, while obscuring anything useful and avoiding having to ask and make himself beholden to Ienzo or anyone. Ienzo can't tell anymore if he's indentured himself to boys or alley cats.

Because he _is_ indentured to them, owes them a debt he never thought he would be able to repay and which he now, tonight, will repay in full twice, three times over.

It was Ïsa's Serenity Crystal which brought him back from the brink of collapse, from a mindless numb state of utter denial, the barest approximation of living and two breaths, one nightmare away from letting the fiends find him, tear him apart so that it could just, for _once_, stop. He could not have recovered from that despair, that horror—_his mother on the edge of the divan laughing and laughing but there is nobody there and she says I love you to the empty air while in the dark attic his father's blood runs between stones seeking cracks to flow down to reach her_—without the same distance Ïsa uses to hold back the lunatics' rage under the light of the Lunar Cry, that same dulling sweetness and soft whispers, the feeling of someone carding a hand through his hair and saying over and over in a voice like his mother's _You are not alone; don't fear_. (He wonders who Ïsa hears.)

The Serenity Crystals are rare and old and probably the only reason Ïsa has not been sent to the slummier sectors to lurk with the other infected. Braig says they've built cages there, to contain the raving madmen poisoned by the moonlight.

Ansem had wanted to discover what made some susceptible, what might reverse the disease, but there is no time to research an illness when people are dying just from the monsters that brought the disease in the first place. There are no solutions for Ïsa, no cures, no time or intention to find one.

Ïsa hadn't been required, even by goodness of heart, to share the gem with Ienzo. But they'd wanted an _in_, wanted to know if Ansem really had abandoned the lunatics, and what better than a painfully intelligent, baby-faced orphan with a seemingly endless untapped reservoir of magic, a walking enigma? Well anyone could see that'd be irresistible to the sage king with no children but a whole host of adopted scientist sons.

Ienzo is under no illusions about the reason he was saved.

But still… But still, Lea and Ïsa are truer orphans than he is and call no castle home and even if he has upheld his part of their bargain unhappily, only through obligation, he's tired of being the source of suffering. There's nothing he can do about the illusion except this.

So he tells them what Ansem has made him do, what well-meaning leap off the slippery edge will activate, with the security system, two nights from now when all the Garden gathers before the gates of the castle to form the sea of lights, reenact the legend of the scattering worlds.

Lea breaths a low, unhappy whistle through his teeth and offers up a little more in return: "The Espers, that band from Sector 6, were planning on a riot at the festival. With that many people around, it woulda gone off like a bomb."

"They will never get the chance."

"It's your magic, ain't it? So why can't you undo it?" Lea looks at Ienzo like a particularly annoying insect which is bumped away and endlessly returning.

"It's been digitized. Ansem will write protect it." Ienzo feels, under the dimming effects of the crystal—especially here, so close to it again—a flicker of anger just beginning to understand its own indignation, to revel in its own existence. "I'm sorry," he adds, although if he's sorry for them or for himself, it's impossible to tell.

Lea snorts. "Not exactly good enough."

Ïsa is still calm enough at least to be a step ahead. "Did you call us here for no reason?" he asks, but it's clear what he means is _How did you intend for us to avoid this?_

Ienzo explains. If there's a sufficient distraction when the illusion is cast, it will not take. If they can avert the initial casting and avoid any contact with the security system which bears the spell, it will be enough to keep their minds free. The sufficient distraction, however, is a problem.

"If you use the Serenity Crystal on Lea as well and then—" Ienzo hesitates, buries one freezing hand in the opposite jacket sleeve, "—break the crystal, the sudden loss of one spell should be enough distraction to keep another from taking hold."

There's silence after this announcement. Ienzo half expects Ïsa to punch him and walk away, but Ïsa only stares coolly down his nose at Ienzo without a trace of any serious emotion either way. Lea, on the other hand, scowls and crosses his arms, momentarily restrained but only in the way that shutting a door on a blaze keeps the smoke in until the oxygen runs out and the fire becomes a towering inferno. He is poised to strike. "What would you get out of this _daring_ rescue?"

Ienzo opens his mouth to tell Lea that only an idiot would look for ulterior motives in a non-mandatory save during which the rescuer also stands to lose something. But Ïsa beats him to it, reminds Lea in no uncertain terms of all their positions: "You," he tells Lea, "are the only one among us who does not need its power."

"But—" It's eerie that Lea can be both the viper and the mouse at once, the fearmonger among precarious allies and afraid for every genuine ally he can keep. Ïsa does not even need protecting, but that does not seem to matter, because Lea is a guard hound at the end of his chain, barely faking sleep. If Ïsa loses the Serenity Crystal and cannot control his lunatic state, he will be forced to leave. Lea does not seem like the type who will take being left behind very well.

Ïsa's face betrays nothing, as used as he must be now to faking a civil expression, and his deadened look gives no indication whether or not he will take Ienzo's advice. Instead, he asks only "When will the spell be released?"

The problem is, Ienzo doesn't know. He doesn't have enough power to counteract the illusion for everyone, but if he knew when Ansem has decided to release it, concealed in which part of the festival, he could at least go amongst the crowd and undermine it as much as possible before he runs out of energy and crashes. But he doesn't know, on purpose, naturally, and so he has no idea what to expect.

He is about to tell Ïsa this when the first few notes of his phrase are swallowed by a slow sound from the edge of the roof behind him. He feels it through the ground as much as he hears it: a slithering of something large and armored going on its stomach over the hard stones, dry and achingly deliberate, the sound a hollowed bone might make cutting marks in old earth and crackling leaves. He does not turn around; he couldn't have even if he had wanted to, every muscle in his spine pulling backward and away until he fears his flesh and blood with flee forward and leave the cage of his skeleton behind. Ienzo becomes acutely aware of how much space is at his back, a whole sky to fill with the beating of chimerical wings, space enough for the gapping maw of a dragon fiend, its black tongue unfurling—reaching (_come out come out wherever you are_) through the midnight air—

Lea and Ïsa, looking over Ienzo's shoulder and above it with fierce scowls but nervous, darting eyes, start to fall back, but then there's matching sounds from the stairwell behind them and the door rattles on its hinges, struck by something enormous from within. There's nowhere to retreat to, no buildings near enough to leap to and no point to duck behind to put something at their backs other than empty air and monsters moving in. Ienzo picked this place because of its remoteness, its inaccessibility.

He has become too complacent, living safe behind the walls of the radiant palace. This is payment in full for his transgressions.

Ienzo could cloak himself from the fiends and walk right past them unharmed, but what would the purpose of warning Lea and Ïsa only to let them die before it ever became an issue? Or he could cloak them all like he had with the other apprentices in the digital world, but then he never intended to reveal his magic to someone like Lea, someone capable of twisting everything to work to his own benefit and doing it with a devil-may-care grin to shame the moon. Lea will find another way to use him.

Ienzo has had enough of being used.

So long as it does not come to push and shove, Ienzo will have to limit himself to using magic on the fiends, filling their heads with visions or distracting flashes of color that they alone will see, hoping all the while that Ïsa will not sense it and think to ask—

Only Ïsa does not look like he is in any position to ask anything. He's torn off his jacket and tossed it away, and the sleeveless high-collared shirt beneath is not doing much to hide his tensing—shoulders a wire tight line, his jaw clenched, his arms stiff and inflexible even as his fingers dig gouges into his flesh above his elbows deep enough to cut.

The Serenity Crystal for lunatics is a helper, not a guarantee. Impending danger will—not might, _will_—trigger the berserk state.

Now they are trapped on a roof between two approaching enemies with a third, more terrible, monster at their backs. The berserker does not discriminate foe from friend and kills not for hunting but from a wild delight in bloodshed and the joy of causing pain at all.

"The barrier," Ïsa growls to Lea, already nearly doubled over under the force of the power fighting to escape. His hair is standing on end, and thin rivulets of blood run down his arms and drip on to stones below from his fingers, still digging deeper and deeper into his own flesh. But he won't feel it, not until long after.

Grimacing fiercely, Ïsa drops to his knees and forces one hand down the length of his arm, sliding through blood, to press his wet fingers to the stones below. He moves with aching slowness, a struggle for every inch, and a half second later Lea has joined him, marking out the confines of a large circle using Ïsa's blood, a black stain on the white stones in the darkness.

The fiends arrive before the circle is complete. The stairwell door bursts open, falling off its hinges, and admits a grotesque number of monsters, each of them crawling over and stabbing at the others mindlessly in pursuit of their cornered prey; behind Ienzo, up the sheer face of the clock tower wall, a metallic clicking of insect legs precedes another three or four monsters, arching up and over the low retaining wall in a writhing rush.

Ienzo misses the digital world, where the enemies were made of misspellings and mathematical errors.

Lea looks between the incoming fiends from the stairwell and the unfinished circle, Ïsa unable to move now, his skin itself seeming to stretch and contort in vicious, animalistic angles. Then Lea makes the choice he trusts in. He turns to the fiends, summons his weapons (not toys, not in a million years with those metal cutting edges, just another disguise for him to hide behind). There's a spark, a dancing rush of flame.

Ienzo heads for Ïsa. Someone has to complete the circle or the outcome of the night will already be decided. His heart pounding messages against his ribs, Ienzo runs.

The tower stones are slick with ice under his castle-issue boots; he loses traction, windmills and catches himself near on too late, one knee almost smashing on the rooftop. Behind him, a shriek splits the air at a decibel half too loud to hear and shivers everything inside him, makes his breath seize in quivering lungs. He does not look back. There's a dull _thkk _of something solid on flesh and fire in the corner of his eye.

Ïsa is too far away. The older boy's feet are not really touching the ground, and the half-moon circle of blood on the stone beneath Ïsa's sneakers ripples of its own accord, farther away from him and closer like the surface of a fountain pool in a blinding wind. The blood is tinged all over silver and red in the moonlight, almost—_almost_—full.

Ienzo gasps in one massive breath and hurls himself forward even faster, desperate to close the distance—there's another scream from nothing human behind him and Lea cursing, but beyond that there's also Ïsa's voice, low but building, a ominous whisper through the chink in an unscalable wall because Ienzo can feel how close he is but can't quite—

Something hits him from behind, rolls him across the rooftop with sudden excruciating pain blooming between his shoulder blades. His head hits the ground; blue and yellow lights flash across his vision. Only sheer self-preserving instinct makes him think to roll again, dodge out from under the falling guillotine of an enormous mantis-like claw. The fiend—half leech, half lizard, part weapon of war—jerks forward again, just as Ienzo clambers to his knees and scrambles around it.

_You don't see— _He cuts the thought off there (_Where is Lea? _Ienzo cannot take being made into a tool again, would rather fight here than hide), keeps running, and he is ten feet from Ïsa, six, four, two—and the monster's approach this time is slower but relentless, the stalk of a confident predator on hopeless prey, closer and closer in agonizing degrees—

But then Ienzo reaches Ïsa's side and, throwing himself down this time, he stretches the last foot and smears his hands through the blood on the stones, fumbling to close the circle.

He feels it the moment the rough-drawn sigil is complete, every hair standing up on his forearms even under the heavy weight of his borrowed coat, a cold, familiar electric shock drowning out the rush of adrenalin—there's an instant flare of atmospheric pressure so the air is too thick to breathe and everything is still for a half second. Then Ïsa _howls_.

The air itself cracks, a dark-lit pane shattering along a thousand invisible seams until even the dim, distant stars seem to shiver, until even the frantic frost clouds of Ienzo's breath dissolve into glittering swirls and nothing. He cannot move; for the longest moment measured on the clock tower face above them between the twenty-third second and the next, every inch of his body holds fast and frozen in fear (or something like it, the frog in the eyes of the adder) and it feels as if all the world is being drawn in and in before the final and ultimate explosion.

Then the insect-lizard fiend is reeling back, its mechanical, grinding shriek counterpart to Ïsa's animal wail and pale, bright fire rolls across its scales, across the wet compound mass of its eyes. Lea darts underneath is flailing forearms, worse for the wear with a sweat-thinned line of blood running down his temple and tears all through his vest. He stands between the fiend and Ienzo and Ïsa, all mock-heroism, batting away the desperate strikes of the monster with those toy discs more metal than they have any right to be, and enough cockiness and breath left in his lungs to learn back and shout, "Planning on _helping_ any?"

And then Lea is gone again, pushing the monster back into a haze of fresh black smoke where even now other inhuman shapes are twisting, unfurling, crawling closer—Ienzo shakes himself, turns back to check the circle is secure (makes the wrong choice, maybe, and trusts Lea with his back for a half moment, nothing more), looking up to Ïsa at last.

Ïsa is not so much a boy as a monster himself: every inch of his china pale skin is pulled taut over his bones, the sharp edge of his jaw locked open, lips curled back in a snarl, skin creasing deeply around the two pit hollows below his crushed brow, and night blue veins card his neck and the backs of his spread hands. His knuckles are white and his fingers stiff-wired in the shape of claws held away from his body but within the dark, rough confines of the circle. His hair spikes out like the hackles of a dog and his back curls in a monstrous arch, by virtue, maybe, of the fact that he is not supporting his own weight but coursing, lifted by the massive out-flux of his own power so that he remains momentarily suspended an inch, a half inch, from the ground, while outstretched and open, his bare arms and face bathe in the cold glow of the moon.

Even deep in the marred, skeletal stretch of his face, Ïsa's odd-colored eyes are full of silver light, and there is a plaintive, furtive look in them directed off into some inexplicable, unnameable dimension, the middle distance where all good answers are kept. Ïsa's eyes search for something—left, right, always above—but independently of his body, which writhes as if in uncontrollable rage even as he hunts the sky, for something, for some message.

Suddenly Ïsa contorts in inhuman ways and hits the barrier with his full weight, screaming in primal rage and bloodlust and his voice is a long fall into a deep grave promising that nothing will remain when he is through with the world.

It's the voice of the fiends themselves, the voice of the mad moon turned to blood leaking despair and loathing, a voice ringing and enormous and jagged edged with hysteria as vast as the reaches of Heaven.

(Lea's voice laughing in the back of Ienzo's head then: _see, sometimes barriers keep things out, and sometimes they keep things in._)

Then Ienzo forgets Ïsa.

The Ienzo forgets Ïsa because there's a growl from behind him too familiar, too ravenous and vile and too much like the echoes still ringing in the confines of his mind from the visions of the flesheater in the attic, the blood red panther-wolf leaning over his father's opened stomach cavity, pulling and pulling—Ienzo turns, too slow, and when he meets the pupilless, jaundice yellow eyes of the monster behind him he cannot move, screams at himself not to give into fear, not to be foolish and his own inner warnings just fall on deaf ears—because behind him, the very same monster—a Blood Taste, it is called a Blood Taste: the flesh over bones wildcat-hellhound cross, its sheathed brain stem wriggling—crouches low and ready to pounce.

It doesn't matter now if he uses his power in front of those who could use him—he has survived worse, suffered worse, _accept your punishment and live_—he needs to not be here; he needs to be invisible to the senses, he needs to run, and now the mouth is opening, the gapping red hole rimmed by the yellowed fangs that he envisioned undoing his father will undo him now _accept your fitting punishment_ his heart jerks and stutters in his chest _please you can't see me_ he can't think straight, can't breathe; where is the Shade Archive, why will it not come, why can't he pull the magic in around him why can't he just _move_—

The Blood Taste leaps and the arc of its body is a perfect predatory collision; it hits him, rolls him back on to the stones almost into the circle where even now Ïsa seems to be baiting it on, snarling and spitting and lunging for them both with the skin of his fingers peeling back from clawing at the magic of his own freely given blood—

The monster's mouth is open and reaching for Ienzo, tongue slicing the air, spreading the smell: everywhere in everything inside him the dead thing smell, the promise _found you_ the Darkness _crawling_ on him, in him—

"Angelo Strike!" a voice that sparkles in the night air like the thousand fountains of the Garden itself screams over the rushing of blood and air in his ears, and the enormous pressure of the beast's body crushing his chest is rocked by impact with a mottled blur that relentlessly slams into the monster. It is pushes off of him, the two indeterminate shapes colliding in a rolling, snapping mass of fur and limbs and teeth, a hailstorm of barking and unearthly roaring that shake his bones in the leaf-thin sheaf of his skin. Every breath is a knife at the base of his neck, twisting and twisting. But he has to breathe. He has to stay awake; if he can just reach the magic…

Something with a sharp edge that glints in the light of Lea's fire rockets bare inches above Ienzo's face, hissing as it cuts the air itself. It makes contact with something beyond his sight with a brutal, wet _thhhk_ answered by a shrieking so unholy and inhuman Ienzo almost needs to scream to block it out, to fill his ears with anything but that _wrong _and venomous, painfully familiar snarling.

And then all the sound of the battle dies away at once in a clattering of claws and whispering human voices, and the long second which follows is so silent Ienzo thinks the sound hasn't stopped but that he has. But then there's a muffled crunch of feet on icy stones moving toward him, and the girl who has somehow saved him materializes in a swirling of blue and black and china white, a dream becoming solid.

"Whew!" She breathes. "Just in time!" The girl—smooth dark hair, mischievous eyes—smiles a clean and beaming smile down at him which only grows when, with a whine, a large, silky dog nudges its way near and leans to lick Ienzo from one end of his face to the other.

"Good girl, Angelo," the girl offers in praise, even as Ienzo struggles to both sit up and fiercely wipe the drool from his cheeks at the same time. A normal dog. This is what threw the monster off of him just now. And—the girl catches his single visible eye assessing the blaster edge strapped to her thin arm and straightens it so he can inspect the sleek black and red metal curves—"This is the Cardinal," she says, rather proud. "Perfect for monster hunting!" So the cutting edge of the Cardinal was what hurt the monster enough to send it running.

The sudden quiet of the battlefield has given way to numerous unfamiliar voices calling congratulations to each other across the open plain of the bell tower roof. The girl reaches out and pulls Ienzo to his feet jauntily, patting him on the shoulder as if swiping off nonexistent dust for him. Then she looks over his head to the circle immediately behind them. Concern writes itself across her face like a storybook, and she moves around Ienzo with an almost eerie grace.

Ienzo intends to watch her—she can't possibly be planning to help Ïsa up or out, not if she has two brain cells to rub together—but the moment he moves to look back at her, he spots her entourage instead. The reason the battle has ended so abruptly is not because she is a brilliant warrior but because she has brought a crowd of people, all of them in deep blue clothing with a set of white eyes, rimmed by feathers, emblazoned on their chests. They're all clutching weapons, some more makeshift than others, and chatting happily over the corpses of the fiends Lea had not done in.

Lea himself stands on the opposite side of this group, looking very put out and more than a little sooty.

Behind Ienzo, the crazy girl is actually speaking to Ïsa, still thrashing and battling against the confines of the barrier. Her hand is pressed against the air around the surface of the invisible magic, and she's speaking in a low, chiming voice, melodious and calming and laced with more than a little magic herself. The contents of her speech are whispered so he cannot hear it all but what he catches sounds suspiciously like a guilt trip revolving around friendship and bonds, and Ienzo has known her all of two seconds and already feels like pinching the space between his brows where a headache is very, very surely forming.

Unbelievably enough, her efforts are actually effective, marked by some unnameable magic as they are, and Ïsa stills, staring up at her with unfocused eyes, all the energy going out of him, his torn up hands falling from the barrier wall to tremble on the ground before him. Rinoa reaches over the barrier line as if there were no magic between them at all, one pale, delicate hand out-stretched.

Ïsa sneers, but the look seems to be for himself, not really for her, and although he turns down her offered hand, he stands of his own volition, swaying only a little on his feet, and his pupils seem to be returning to a human shape, his muscles, one by one, untensing. Lea is suddenly there with them, draping Ïsa's blue coat over his shoulders, and there's a strange moment which Ienzo would not have expected from the spitfire and acid boy during which, a little reverently, he washes Ïsa's arms over with a bottle of glowing green potion, watching (with some degree of fondness which does not seem to suit him or which he wished did not) the cuts from Ïsa's own nails seal slowly.

Ïsa slaps at his hands a moment later, growling because his throat is too raw for words or because he's still not as calm as he's pretending. Lea stands close, laughs like some private joke has just been shared between them, and pats both Ïsa's shoulders once and then again. Ïsa shrugs him off and rolls his eyes, but Ienzo does not miss the way Lea's gesture is what loosens the last tense lines of Ïsa's face.

So maybe it makes sense that the girl's friendship speech was what got through, and underneath all their knife-edged wit and devilry, damn double-crossing, they are two idiots who buy into those legends about the Light of children's hearts and eternal ties and the naïve little rule that good always triumphs.

(Ienzo would like to believe in goodness of heart still, though, because it's the one thing that can't be made into illusion.)

The girl clears her throat primly, and when she has their attention, sweeps her arm in a delicate, showy bow. Her dog—Angelo—barks happily as if on cue. "You know," the girl grins, straightening, "a few thanks might be in order."

Ïsa's stare is positively deadpan. He arches one eyebrow, and the disdain practically rolls off him. Although, to his credit, it's a shade lighter than Ienzo knows Ïsa can be, with some genuine gratitude as a mitigating factor.

"I'm Rinoa Heartilly." Her introduction is unsolicited, but it seems her name isn't entirely unknown to Lea, at least. Although he scoffs under his breath, his eyes are narrow and calculating. The girl steams on as if she hasn't heard him (maybe she really hasn't). She waves back to the gathering group of men and women behind her. "We're the Forest Owls."

There's an uneven degree of cheering among the group. Someone in the back _who-who_s. Another voice happily tells her to "Preach it, Princess!"

"This clock tower is part of our territory," Rinoa says. "We patrol this area to keep it safe from fiends."

Lea shakes his head, reaching to wipe soot off the bridge of his nose but just making it smear like war paint. "Never heard of you," he cheerfully announces.

Rinoa huffs, puffing out her cheeks in a momentary pout. "We're the biggest rebel group in Radiant Garden!" she declares. "We won't stop until our mission is achieved. We're going to liberate this Garden from the clutches of tyranny! Soon, we'll be strong enough to help the people of this city declare their independence." Angelo barks again, which says Rinoa's whole speech is more routine than she delivers it.

And who talks freely of insurrection in front of anyone who will listen?

Lea looks at Ïsa. Ienzo can only look at Rinoa, watching the fierce determination concealed just beneath the surface of her porcelain doll's face—she means it, means to carry her plans through come hell and high treason. She is no doubt in on the riot plan to take place at the lantern festival, dreaming of seamlessly crafted coups backed by the vulnerable masses and fueled solely by a thousand good intentions. She loves this world, this city; that's scrawled over every inch of her firm stance, of her hopeful, leaping gaze and in the corners of her smile which forms now for dreams of better days. She is just waiting for her chance.

And she doesn't know.

She doesn't know that her pretty revolution will never come because in two days time his spell will blot that determination, that passion from her mind—wash it over in visions of pureness and perfection and everything she sees will shine, everything she tastes will be nectar, everyone she speaks to will ache with happiness. And as fiercely as she declares her goals now, in two days, she will sing the praises of the kingdom closest to Heaven, the paradise of innovation and Light, parroting a sentiment that never was her own.

Or his.

Ienzo can't help it; he laughs at the irony, wryly, angrily, half in furious tears only everything is still dulled and thankfully a thousand miles away so that he can laugh for the moment, instead of cry.

Rinoa politely smiles, waits, unknowing.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The night of the lantern festival, a servant girl is sent to help him dress, and Even is sent to make certain no parts of the evening's finery disappear in the process. This time, there's no speaking from any party; Even seems less annoyed than usual but somehow more drawn, exhausted. He expects trouble tonight and doesn't know there won't be any.

Ansem has not told them, has not told any of the other apprentices, ostensibly because there's no method for preventing the spell from affecting them. Ienzo prefers to think that Ansem will not tell because, if the others knew, they would refuse him, repudiate him themselves and stand with the people in championing freedom—of choice, of feeling, of mind.

And they would be wrong. And they would walk their world hand-in-hand into Darkness and chaos, terror and despair, rebellion from within while the incessant hounding of the fiends tears down their defenses without, and Ansem would stand above this in a crumbling castle and know he was right all along.

But still. Ienzo would rather watch the world walk to its death freely.

Normally he refuses the servants or any help dressing because yes, he has to stand on the foot stool to get his coats off the hangars in the wardrobe, but he's a genius for Hyne's sake and he can put his own clothes on quickly enough.

Only tonight he can't, because the activation of the spell depends on certain formalities which Ansem has arranged for him to observe, and those formalities include, of all things, full imperial dress, the official robes and regalia of the kingdom's archmage.

Maybe that's why Even is unhappy this evening. Certainly, he has been practicing magic longer than Ienzo, although his uses his own innate ice magic so rarely it is easy to forget. If anyone should be displeased with Ienzo's sudden assumption of a long-dead court role, it ought to be Dilan, whose aero magic is so perfectly refined he can tell how many beetles are flitting about in a garden on the other side of the city if he tries. But no one seems to care except for noting that it's rather strange for the master to expect so much pomp and circumstance, when normally they all go to festivals in their standard wear.

Certainly, they must be thinking it strange to dress Ienzo in material so heavy he can barely move in it, on the most likely occasion for a riot the city has ever seen.

Even is hovering near the foot of Ienzo's bed, getting in the servant's way and making frustrated noises at the layers of material still left to be put on. Ienzo stands before his wardrobe mirror watching his own face fall and fall with a detached sort of interest. He is already wearing the loose navy pants and the tall bronzed-leather boots, as well as a thin muslin shirt with too long of sleeves, capped by bronze metal bands instead of cuffs. There's half-sleeved tunic to throw on over this, of a slightly paler blue heavily embroidered with metallic thread, and a sleeveless royal blue coat that goes over that, equally patterned by threads that catch the light, and all these layers still need to be bound up by a navy sash, which is, apparently, tied in some ridiculously complicated way that not even the servant seems to fully grasp. Over that, he's expected to wear the archmage's cloak, midnight blue velvet and so long on Ienzo it trails a good three or four feet behind, its hood draping; the metal and stitched-in trimming is so heavy Ienzo struggled just to throw the cloak up on his bed an hour ago, let alone wear it.

It's not without a little fussing from all parties—Even has never been particularly patient with either slow or unhelpful people, and Ienzo and the servant girl are being both in turn—that the outfitting is finished, and true to Ienzo's expectations, although he can walk, there is no way he will be able to get up or down stairs in such cumbersome clothing.

Even dismisses the servant girl and calls Aeleus instead. When Aeleus enters the room, a little confused as to the summons, he is too slow to hide his amusement at Ienzo's useless state, a smile which disappears too quickly beneath a cough developed a little too conveniently. Ienzo tries to convey his displeasure at the teasing look but with his face half hidden by the hood, his scowl seems to amount to little more than fuel for the fire.

It's no less mortifying to be picked up and carried like an infant, light enough for Aeleus to balance in one arm. Ienzo tries to tell himself necessity is necessity, but mostly he wants to burn the outfit and let Lea play dress up with it, mostly he wants to burn the world tonight and let it be someone else's burden and backyard to act out the apocalypse in.

He's so deeply lost in thought, in the unpleasant churning of his own stomach, his whole body saying this is wrong, that they are in the grand entrance hall of the castle long before he expects it, and the hall is alive with servants making last minute preparations, with sentries stiffly guarding, with the whole staff of the court, advisors and auditors alike, with Dilan and Braig and the master already waiting for them, all in their regalia: epaulettes, medals, long coats, polished boots.

Ansem turns to look at them; his eyes find Ienzo's and Ienzo has to look away because Ansem is just as anguished, as well-meaning, as set on protecting this world as any of them—more than any of them—and still, despite a vivid loathing he seems to be reserving for himself, the master looks proud, proud of Ienzo's choice—or, just as easily, of the fact that Ienzo was so easily convinced.

Ienzo's stomach leaps to his throat. There's nothing to be proud of, nothing about deceit and lies that deserves anything but secrecy and silence. He thinks of Rinoa, sure and bright and doomed to failure.

Aeleus sets him on the ground before the master and it's only after this horizontal shift that Ienzo realizes Kairi has been clinging to the back of the master's cloak, shrinking away from this stranger and that. When she sees Ienzo suddenly enter her low field of vision, she stumbles out from behind the master to wave her hellos. She's been set upon by the servants too, and is bound up in an outfit less impossible to move in but even finer than his own, her lilac dress studded by cream white pearls and mithril threading, soft black boots on her feet and a silver and orichalcum tiara glittering in her hair.

Ienzo realizes, belatedly, what the master intends to do, and it's smart and vile all at once. Ansem will not go first himself, too likely to incite a mob too fast. Instead, he will send the smallest, the children: so innocent and doll-like, an infantile princess and archmage like two little beacons for a shining future, and while the crowd restrains themselves from rioting before children, the spell will be set, the trap sprung, and long before Ansem comes to deliver the address he was supposed to give first, the people will be singing his praises on high, convinced they are led by angels, not fools or fallible men.

Even this, even this child's body which he barely feels attached to can and will be taken advantage of by someone.

Kairi reaches out and takes his hand, somehow aware of his feelings even if she doesn't know what drives them, and he closes his hand in turn but can't reassure her any more than that while his own heart keeps wavering.

One of the finely dressed stewards is making sweeping motions, and people begin to fall in line. Above them, far away but still impossibly loud, rattling in his chest, the chapel bells begin to boom, tolling out the first hour after full dark. Aeleus helps him and Kairi move into the forming procession of courtiers, before the master and the other apprentices. The towering castle doors creak open.

The main square is so full of people no square inch of paving stones can be seen, and the endless crowding of humans spills well beyond the square into the neighboring streets. Not everyone in the Garden can be present, but everyone that can is, packed so closely in together there is no room to move, everyone slowly shedding their winter gear from the heat of so many bodies and so many flames.

Every single person is carrying a lantern, a hundred thousand shapes and colors, golden paper stars and red fish, moombas, wyverns, moogles, classic wooden lanterns, little oil lamps rising on kites, miniature hot air balloons, children close to the castle stairs using their lanterns on thin reed sticks like play swords, spilling hot wax over the ground.

The city is a sea of light, a hundred thousand hearts glowing to illuminate the darkness, enough even to offset the bloody light of the moon. Everything is awash with warm golden candlelight, with people chatting freely, with fine dresses and winter bridge coats and held hands and closeness, and Ienzo remembers, remembers the feeling of settling between his mother and father for a long wait every year, his mother remarking on the fineness of the lanterns his father had bought, his father stretching to put an arm over her shoulders and catching Ienzo too, telling him the best way to tilt the lantern to change the way the smoke curled like a dragon's breath upward and away—that always there was snow on the ground but that every year he was warm, and safe, and full of wonder for the ritual, his family, the world.

And for a minute, watching the shifting, living sea of lanterns before him, an endless field of Light, he can believe they really do live the closest to Heaven of any men in any world.

It's that momentary, fleeting feeling alone which makes him lift his feet and begin the slow, arduous walk to the fount placed at the head of the towering castle stairs, where already two sets of steps have been erected for him and Kairi, so that at least their faces can be seen over the basin of oil ready for the lighting of the yearly flame, for the brightest glow of all, imitation of the very heart of the world, to shine out over their people.

On the way there, with a great deal of ceremony and a ringing swirl from the Garden's orchestral symphony, Ienzo is handed an open oil lamp on a long stem by some honored advisor or another who Ienzo has not bothered to remember because they are entirely figureheads, rarely meet with the master at all unless they want to lobby for more funds on this or that particular pet project. Ienzo is distracted enough that it takes him a long moment to realize this means that stoking the Garden's Light has been handled down to them too, and he sees it play out in his mind with no small amount of disgust and despair, how staged it will be, how grotesquely showy.

It is all of that and more. Despite the slowness of their shuffling along in heavy clothing, they reach the stairs before the oil fount and he helps Kairi to climb them, careful with the burning wick of his lamp so that it does not fall into the fire prematurely. Standing over the fount by only a head or so, Kairi even less, he looks out over the people, all of them looking forward now, returning the stare, and the golden light of a hundred thousand lanterns shines on their faces, full of anger and hope and still, inextinguishable love for their country in equal terms.

Another advisor, one of some particularly trumped up honor, is announcing their presence and their role in the festivities with his voice magnified by microphones which Ienzo knows feed not only throughout the city's sound systems but directly into the virtual world, where Tron is waiting patiently to follow his beloved Primary User's commands, never thinking to ask just what those commands might wrought…

Behind him, Ienzo can feel Ansem waiting; the announcer's voice dies away and yes, this is the time, the moment when he will either bring the world crashing down around them or blind them all for the greater good. The oil lamp wavers in his hand. Kairi stares up at him and then reaches a little for the lamp. Ienzo transfers it to the hand nearer to her, and she reaches out to hold it too, a united front, still in good faith that the man who leads in her stead leads wisely.

There never was any choice.

Ienzo recites the pass code to trigger the spell, his own impossibly young, reedy, trembling voice magnified by the system and fed to Tron as well. "To right the countless wrongs of our day, we shine this light of true redemption, that this world may become as paradise."

Together he and Kairi lower the oil lamp to the fount before them, and the bright flames to represent the city's heart roar to life, dancing toward Heaven.

The new security system launches in a whirl, to the people's shock, the claymore interfaces scattering amongst the festival goers, digital light circles skittering over the stones and analyzing, hunting for any traces of the fiends or other monsters.

Everywhere the security systems activate and move, they shed half-invisible flarings of dark light, his digitized illusion repeated and repeated a million times until it spreads among the people like a disease, like the red death relentlessly crawling, and he can see it—feel it—as the anger and fear and unrest begins to wash away under the weight of so many visions of peace and virtue, languorous perpetual summers, sparkling streets, children's giggling bottled and brewed—under the weight of everything good and beautiful and moving in their world endlessly, endlessly repeated, and when they all look up again they are smiling, laughing in a delight none of them will ever know is false and waiting for a king they will never remember wanting to dethrone.

Ienzo's stomach roils; his head swims, and he's a half foot and a bad lean from falling into the hot pit of burning oil himself.

Then he _feels_ the Serenity Crystal break because he himself is breaking, the whole world before him splitting and falling away into darkness—into the darkness of his house six months of _he is dead he is dead why won't you just rest in peace_, watching his own body crumble, bleed out, thrash with his skin opened, watching his mother look and not know what she was seeing, watching the whole house rearrange, begin to speak, someone's hand carding through his hair and using his mother's voice even while she's standing silent in front of him not speaking _why won't she ever say I love you anymore? Where is the key? _He hasn't seen the stars in six months, hasn't breathed the outside air in six months; there's a gravestone somewhere with his name on it, but how long before there will be one for his father, how long before his mother whose mind has gone long before her forgets to feed herself like she failed to feed Ienzo, and how long before the house grows so decrepit the neighbors break in the door at last, find his parents' bodies nonsensically mangled, bury them on either side of the empty coffin carved with his name like he deserves that place, like they'll all be going the same place—

He is not going anywhere and he will never get to leave; the view changes, but he will always be in the dark attic, behind the locked door, watching his father bleed to death laughing because Ienzo was a failure son and a monster, now turned a false prophet, a poor player of god. Beside him, no one will ever stay healthy and whole. He will never be free.

There is no such thing as paradise.

Darkness and decay hold illimitable dominion over all.

He is crying. For the first time since the magic first came to him (near a year ago now in the snow of late winter when the Blood Taste found him defenseless in the alley), hot, enormous, unstoppable tears roll unchecked down his face and everyone around him is too full of sudden, inexplicable joy to notice except for Kairi, who is crying quietly too and doesn't know why, and he can't make it stop, can't even stop the low, desperate keening he's making under snatches of the national anthem from the crowd, tears falling and falling to ruin the velvet of the cloak which he doesn't deserve, which he never earned, which never meant anything except that he had been betrayed once again by the man he had taken for his father and then—

And then Aeleus is there, a physical wall against the world and the in-pouring of the lantern light, a mockery of stars, and he doesn't try futilely to wipe away Ienzo's tears, just holds him close and safe, high enough on the stairs to lean over Aeleus's shoulder and fist fingers in the back of his jacket, pulling and pulling to release the pressure somewhere.

Here is someone who has never betrayed him, never mocked, never avoided.

Aeleus's low voice is rumbling in his ear, only Ienzo can't make it out for the longest time under his hiccoughing. He doesn't calm but eventually the sound goes out of him because no more tears will come, and it's only then that he realizes they have moved inside, into a side drawing room, and Even, Dilan, and Braig are there as well, sitting on divans or leaning against the wall in varying states of confusion and frustration.

Aeleus is saying "What did he do you, Ienzo? What did the master do?" in a way that has devolved half into comforting sounds, mantra-like and all the meaning gone from the words, but for the moment it's enough. They could not have avoided the spell but they are no fools, could not have missed the times the master has disappeared with Ienzo in the last few days to do work none of them know about, which the spell will not have erased.

And they are willing to believe him, to sit here waiting and then to listen because he is a failure son but not a failure brother, because he draped the coat over Aeleus and laughed for Even, and made illusory monster targets for Braig and remembered where Dilan had forgotten his books. And even if the master isn't there, even if his father is gone, there is still someone who will believe him.

Only he can't speak. He shakes his head, shivers, refuses to admit anything (admit to anything). The spell has too strong a hold for Aeleus to question his denial, to think that a shake of the head could mean so much more than _No he did not hurt me_, because in a perfect world that is what it would mean. Dilan and Even seem equally relieved.

But over Aeleus's shoulder, Ienzo meets Braig's eyes, every day a brighter auburn shade, and with a jolt, Ienzo sees that Braig is not satisfied, that he knows—that he _sees_ Ienzo is lying.

That he has seen through everything.

Something has shielded Braig from the illusion, and he does not look pleased. So then, in every meaning of the phrase, Ienzo is not alone.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» τεισίV «** ― ― ― ― ― o

Days pass in a haze. He feels like he did just after the death of his father, when he climbed free of the dark attic like the running murderer he was and the world was a swimming pool of colors, everything rushing, everything shifting. He barely makes contact with anything or anyone, eats when instructed, hides in his room.

He does not want to hear the security system is 98% successful at eradicating fiends, that murders and violent crimes have suddenly plunged, mitigated by perpetual happiness.

The master was right, of course.

And yet, there are still some fiends left, there is still the lurking unknown of what triggered the Lunar Cry, what immense Darkness would necessarily have to be gathered to bring that power forth. What calamity might have been borne into their world by a dark Keyblade wielder…

Braig has gathered them all to discuss this, somehow the only capable one of them left. "Yeah, yeah," he's arguing over Dilan, "zippity doo dah, they're not about to burn us in effigy. Doesn't change a thing. Something big's gotten into this world, and we oughta know what. It's Darkness, sure, but what do we _know_ about Darkness or all this business about people's hearts?" He makes an X over his own. "Seems to me, we've been ignoring our mythology."

"Are you suggesting," Even rolls his eyes, "that we research Darkness itself?"

"Duh," Braig laughs, "know your enemy."

Aeleus and Dilan are silent, sharing a look familiar to all scientists that is half horror and half intrigue, with a guarantee already of which will win out. Dilan nods to concede the point: "There is the matter of the unusual fluctuations at the reactor. If the source of this were not addressed, no matter the people's happiness, Radiant Garden would still be in peril."

"Bullseye," Braig says. "Great, we can kill the fiends and clear out the city now, but what happens when something bigger shows up? We need to know what Darkness can do to you."

Aeleus has his arms crossed, a skeptical look on his face which would give Ienzo pause if he hadn't already guessed where this conversation was going. "How do you purpose we pursue this line of research?"

"Step one's to get the boss man on board. Not a problem if I—"

"No," Ienzo says, stands, sweeping one long, sharpening look around the room at the other apprentices. The master is right, he is always right; Ienzo will follow any plan of his father's, but his father is dead—he has killed him with one too many nightmares—_my god_ he is so sick of being used.

"Let me go," Ienzo says. "I will handle Master Ansem."

Braig grins, feral as any monster, just as much tooth, just as cold. "Good boy."

The meeting isn't adjourned, but Ienzo turns and goes anyway, the heavy door falling shut behind him. They are deep within the castle where there are no windows, in a corridor so unused no electric bulbs or torches are lit.

He starts a long walk down the path into darkness.

o ― ― ― ― ― **» Vίσιετ «** ― ― ― ― ― o

The story wasn't finished but Myde came back to himself in degrees, blurry eyed, half from dreaming and half probably from crying although he couldn't even remember doing that, couldn't remember anything except Darkness and black coats and the grey walls of a castle constantly shifting—everything leading back and back to those moments with Ienzo, with the apprentices, when they all started to fall apart, looked too deep into the secrets of the heart—

At first, Myde couldn't figure out why he stopped reading. It was impossibly, horribly late, 4:25am in the morning according to his nightstand clock, but he could have, would have read all night if something hadn't... Something…

"I'm late, I'm late for a very important date! No time to say hello, goodbye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!" a nasally voice sung out in the dim of his room and Myde jumped in alarm, practically tumbling out of bed before he realized, with a cringe, that the sound was a new ringtone on his phone.

Actually, now that he thought about it… wasn't that the ringtone he'd set for the _hospital's_ phone number?

_Crap!_ Myde rolled out of bed in a way that would have made an action hero proud if he hadn't been under the covers and holding a heavy book when it happened, which resulted in less of a smooth roll and more of a terrific tangling of sheets and several sound smacks of plastic book cover against face. Scrambling around on the disaster zone called his bedroom floor, Myde made it out of the covers at last and then had to paw frantically for his phone, only to realize—_ugh, idiot_—that it was still in the pants he'd never changed out of, right there in his pocket all along.

Myde dragged the phone out, and just before answering, realized he had six missed calls already. Double crap.

"Hello?" he managed, only a little breathless.

"Myde!" Aerith gasped an enormous sigh of relief on the other side. "Thank god you answered. I really didn't know what I'd do if you didn't pick up—"

She was worried. But Aerith didn't _do _distraught. What the hell had happened at the hospital? Wait, why was she calling from the hospital at 4:25am in the morning anyway? She was a day-shift doctor! "What's wrong?" he asked, dread striking like lightning down his spine.

Aerith hesitated. There was a beat of silence on the line. Finally, she said, all in a miserable rush: "Ienzo won't… he won't wake up. You have to come down here—"

She didn't get to finish. He'd already hung up, was already running for the door.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Đίŝŝσηąηĉε : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

**Final Mix:**

1) If there are still lingering **questions** about head canon-y choices, you can ask them via PM/review/whatever; however, 90 percent of the time my answer will be "Rule of Cool, that's why," and the other ten percent of the time it will be "Don't think too hard," so get ready for that.

2) Is anyone interested in reading this fic on **AO3 instead of Fanfiction**? I prefer AO3 very much now, but I don't want to switch in the middle. If anyone would prefer AO3, I'll start posting in both places.

3) Another absolutely **mind-bendingly incredibly fanart** for this fic has been done by reader **Secretie**. The link is up in my profile; please check it out and go shower her with praise!

4) **References to literature:** "The Masque of the Red Death" gets another reference in the line about death's illimitable dominion, rather obviously. There's also a vague reference to _The Princess Bride_.

5) **References to other fandoms:** The _Final Fantasy VIII_ theme continues, most notably with Rinoa and the Forest Owls. _Final Fantasy XIII_ characters get some cameos, and Ienzo's speech at the lantern festival is word-for-word from _The World Ends With You_, because it was incredibly fitting and I wanted to work way more references to that game than I have been able to. Myde's ringtone is the White Rabbit's song from _Alice in Wonderland_. I think there are some others but I've forgotten where…


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